WVU Dept. of English
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Digital technologies are transforming literary studies. The challenge today is to find meaningful ways to access and represent the vast archives of digital data already available — the task of knowledge representation. The mission of the KnowledgeBase Project is innovation in knowledge representation. The project makes available archives and tools for teachers, researchers, and students of literature. KnowledgeBase also provides a test bed for advanced pedagogical technologies, experimenting in AI-based technologies for searching and organizing information. The long-term goal is to design cost-effective, distributed multimedia that reflect and augment how people learn and think — technologies at a human pace.

KnowledgeBase is developed by an interdisciplinary team of faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates at West Virginia University. The Project will supply the necessary tools for teaching literature in digital environments, and will model future research in knowledge-based humanities computing. At the same time, KnowledgeBase begins from the recognition that negotiating and navigating knowledge is an epistemological and cultural problem. The project also researches the encounter between literary studies and informatics, laying the grounds for hybrid disciplines that directly address a world of digital technologies.

The first stage of KnowledgeBase is a syllabus archive, completed in the Spring of 2002. The developing syllabus archive and pedagogical resources facilitate scholarly exchange and institutional memory. The second stage of the project will explore possible logics for literary works, with the goal of an intelligent hypermedia system. By creating powerful and flexible means of linking and grouping information, readers can for the first time realize the promise of hypermedia, creating paths and annotations that reflect an immediate encounter with the literary text.

The Knowledgebase team is Sandy Baldwin, Jeanne Hamming, Deana Karstaedt, and Kelly Latta. Check the KnowledgeBase site frequently for updates and new developments. Contact Sandy Baldwin at charles.baldwin@mail.wvu.edu for more information on the Project.