Village Voice : expressing narrative through community-designed ontologies

Abstract

The Village Voice project is a study of the efficacy of a localized ontology in the dissemination of narrative. It seeks to understand how community members can articulate their lives in ways that allow each other to reflect on the makeup of their overall community, and how they represent their community's needs to those outside of the group. I utilize a knowledge model, or ontology, created by community members as a foundation for representing and retrieving story fragments (video clips). The focus of this thesis will be to study the methodology by which such a knowledge model can be elicited, and the relative benefits of representing stories by this mechanism versus the standard database technique of keyword indexing. I evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of this ontology-driven narrative system within the real-world context of a local community of Somali refugees (Jamaica Plain, MA).