What sorts of contributions are appropriate for this PubPub Community?

The ASK welcomes a variety of contributions, including:

• complete discourse graphs

• complete results graphs

• research roadmaps

• discourse graph and results graph components (e.g. QUE, CLM, EVD, SRC)

• writing about discourse and results graphs

• writing about research roadmaps

• technical specifications and resources relevant to graph communication

All of these contributions can be submitted as a Pub or linked to Pub.

How to contribute to a Discourse or Results Graph

If you have been thinking in graphs, or would like to start, you've come to the right place. This PubPub Community aims to serve as a living repository for Discourse and Results Graphs and their components.

The ASK uses PubPub's nifty DOI assignment feature to help make our shared graphs and graph communities indexable, addressable, and discoverable. Each graph or graph element connected to this PubPub community can receive a doi at the appropriate level of granularity: you can think of each submission as an invitation to a conversation taking place at multiple scales, where conversants can reference whole graphs or their constituent parts as needed.

How to add a graph or graph component to this PubPub Community

Submit a complete graph

Sharing a complete graph with this community is as simple as creating a Pub to host the metadata, a short description of the graph, and a link to the graph data.

The external graph may live in a github repository, as a published obsidian graph, as a published roam graph, as a csv, as a database, as a text file, or even as a static image.

These Pubs will be added to the Atlas for discoverability.

Submit a single hypothesis, conclusion, result, or source

A single experimental result/simulation outcome, claim/conclusion, or hypothesis/research question can be submitted as a Pub or linked to a Pub.

• Hypotheses will live on the Questions page

• Conclusions will live on the Claims page

• Results will live in the Evidence page

• Experimental details & literature sources will reside on the Sources page.

Each discourse graph contribution should be anchored to a Pub containing basic metadata:

• the author's handle

• the date of the contribution

• the nature of the contribution (graph, hypothesis/question, conclusion/claim, result/evidence, experiment/source)

• the content or a link to the content

• any relevant reference information (e.g. does this contribution support/oppose/inform other graphs or graph elements in the ASK or elsewhere?)

For example, a PubPub anchor stub may link to a graph externally hosted on Roam Research or elsewhere online, or it may simply declare its contents, as in this example Anchor Pub.

Creating relations between graph components

Atomic graph elements are interesting in and of themselves, but they become much more useful when enmeshed in a network of conversational and informational relationships.

The creation of a graph component such as a result suggests or implies the rest of the graph: sharing discourse nodes can inspire the collaborative discovery of their context and connections.

For our PubPub-based graphs, we can use hyperlinks to encode relational information.

Recall that the basic Discourse Graph edges convey the following relationships:

• supports

• opposes

• informs

• generates

• substantiates

• contextualizes

These terms are used to connect nodes as shown in the diagram below:

• CLM can inform or generate QUE

• CLM can support or oppose other claims

• EVD can support or oppose a CLM

• EVD can inform or generate a question

• SRC can substantiate or contextualize EVD

These six terms are our edge labels. Each Pub should contain a hyperlink labelled with one of these terms linking to the appropriate node, either in the ASK community or elsewhere.

In a visual representation of a discourse or results graph, the valence and direction of these relations can be indicated visually. In our abstract graph of hyperlinked text, we can indicate these attributes lexically.

For example, if you submit a working hypothesis generated by extant results, the PubPub contribution describing your hypothesis should have a hyperlink labelled "generated by" connecting to the hypothesis to the relevant results. Relatedly , if you submit a result that you believe informs an existing hypothesis, the Pub should have an "informs" hyperlink connecting these nodes.

Nodes may have more than one relationship: an EVD (result) node may inform a QUE (hypothesis) and also oppose a CLM (conclusion) -- this conclusion may not even be related to the same QUE node!

The real discourse graph was the connections we made along the way

Ideally one could assign authorship to the creation of graph edges as well: discovering relationships between entities can surface undiscovered public knowledge, a credit-worthy endeavour.

At present, credit for uncovering such linkages is usually attributed to the creator of the node encoding the claim that these other nodes (usually results) should be connected. We look forward to experimenting with new ways of attributing these edges!