Communicating Meaning

My colleagues and I have been applying, computationally, cross-disciplinary theories and practices of human communication for the last four years. The philosopher and mathematician Peter Gärdenfors' posited in "Conceptual Spaces" that meaning emerged in people's heads, and that a geometric philosophy of meaning held advantages as against a symbolic (in which he had done much work already) or associationist. We have combined these theories with Freyd's notion of shareability and the psychologically-rooted practices of semantic space algorithms such as HAL and LSA, to study various aspects of online communication. For example, analysis of the text of email messages and blog entries have been used to investigate the discovery of tacit knowledge in communities of practice, discovery of social networks in organisations, and, perhaps of most interest, how the consideration of a (still primitive) computationally defined and derived "sense-of-self" can assist the healing of people with chronic illness. This work will be of interest to the workshop as it deals both with theories of meaning, as relating to communicating that meaning rather than abstract preoccupations, as well as practical, computationally feasible means of applying the theories in a variety of situations.