Discourse structure and discourse relations are an important ingredient in systems for the analysis of text that go beyond the boundary of single clauses. Discourse relations often indicate important additional information about the connection between two clauses, such as causality, and are widely believed to have an influence on aspects of reference resolution. More so than for referential ann...

This chapter draws from research in the Pilbara (Western Australia), and to a lesser extent in the Gulf of Carpentaria (Queensland), on the Indigenous engagement with the mining industry. Post-Native Title Act land use agreements have been made between industry and Native Title claimant groups, in these two regions as others, known generally as ‘community benefit packages’. These agreements and...

The phrase "virtual community" is often used to describe long term, computer-mediated conversations amongst large groups. This paper suggests that such conversations may be better viewed as instances of a participatory genre, rather than as community. A genre-oriented analysis is useful because it encourages a focus on the medium within which the discourse is embodied. As an example we analyze ...

This article examines how principals describe the nature of relationships and presence (or absence) of relational trust among teachers, and between the teachers and the principal in the discourse of professional learning communities. Participants were 12 school principals from urban, suburban, and rural communities in Manitoba. In the discourse of learning communities, the notion of trust is ar...

The implementation of a system to support a learning web (Norrie and Gaines, 1995) involves the coordinated support of a wide range of knowledge processes in a learning community. These include the discourse processes among members of the community, the dissemination of knowledge through documents and multimedia resources, the elicitation, sharing and comparison of conceptual structures, and th...

In this paper, I focus on clarifying and expanding the analytic concept of “community” to account for the interaction between groups of networked people, prone to interacting in dynamic and multidimensional digital paradigms. I seek to discuss the questions: 1) How do community managers at a video game development studio in Los Angeles structure and shape their large-scale, global online commun...

Community development is generally considered to be a core component of social work practice and knowledge. Yet much professional social work education and discourse seems to relegate community development to the margins. This paper critically analyses the development of a community development subject within one particular Australian social work course. Particular attention is drawn to subject...