Question
Asked 13 May 2014

What sensemaking do you do, and is there any good tool?

I am working on a data visualisation tool to support sensemaking, which just means making sense of something. Examples are understanding an unfamiliar research field or finding your next holiday destination. This usually involves searching/reading from many sources and reasoning (probably not the best word) with all the discovered information. This goes beyond showing what's interesting in the data, and is usually a quite complex process (for example the Pirolli Card model: http://ccom.unh.edu/vislab/VTDP_web_pages/VTDP_Sensemaking.html).
I am very interested in the actual daily tasks that are relevant to sensemaking, rather than abstracted ones such as information triage and foraging (the tool will support concrete tasks). What sensemaking do you do, and is there any tool for that? It will be ideal if there is an overview survey on people's daily sensemaking tasks.
Thanks.

All Answers (2)

Olha Buchel
New England Complex Systems Institute
My dissertation was about sensemaking and map-based visualizations:
My task was collection understanding.
Olha
Kai Xu
University of Nottingham
Thanks, Olga. The thesis seems very relevant, and I am sure some of the references will point me to other sense making tasks. Will give it a read.

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