sensemaking

This paper is based on a study of personal experience narratives told by witnesses of the September 11th attacks in calls to C-SPAN. Drawing on research on narratives of ordinary and extraordinary experiences and witnessing, the author offers a framework for analyzing the structure and function of eyewitness accounts. Analysis focuses on methods callers use to show and tell the audience where they were, what they were doing, and what they were thinking at the time of the attacks. Verbal, visual, and structural features of these narratives are highlighted, with particular attention given to orientation and ideation components of the narratives. The design of these components and their location within the callers' stories are shown to construct the narratives as eyewitness accounts, position the callers and audience members as witnesses, and engage all in a therapeutic sensemaking process.

Human Centered Systems in the Perspective of Organizational and Social Informatics

In the process of knowledge discovery, workers examine available information in order to make sense of it. By sensemaking, we mean interacting with and operating on the information with a variety of information processing mechanisms [3,18]. Previously, we introduced a concept that uses the spreadsheet metaphor with cells containing visualizations of complex data. In this paper, we extend and apply a cognitive model called "visual sensemaking " to the Visualization Spreadsheet. We use the task of making sense of a large Web site as a concrete example through out the paper for demonstration. Using a variety of visualization techniques, such as the Disk Tree and Cone Tree, we show that the interactions of the Visualization Spreadsheet help users draw conclusions from the overall relationships of the entire information set.

Using the 1994, South Canyon fire in Colorado as a case study, this article suggests Taylor's (1993) concept of worldview functions as an important "frame" for organizational sensemaking (Weick, 1995a). Taylor argues that organizations use either an "activity" or "particle" orientation. An activity view focuses attention on organizational units while a particle view sees the organization from the point of view of the product or customer. Results from this study indicate that an organization's worldview functions as an overarching metaphor that influences sensemaking and decision-making processes, and that the worldview perspective in retrospective accounts may differ from that of the participants themselves.

Very interesting user interface Compare to http:carrot2.sf.net/

The OKKAM project aims at enabling the Web of Entities, namely a virtual space where any collection of data and information about any type of entities (e.g. people, locations, organizations, events, products, ...) published on the Web can be integrated into a single virtual, decentralized, open knowledge base

Sensemaking is the way in which people understand the world at large scale: how they decide what kind of goals are reasonable to try for and what kinds of strategies are worth trying or using. Sensemaking is related to what the military call situational awareness.

Once students have gathered information on a topic, it is important that they reflect on whether the information they have gathered is sufficient to answer the research question. This requires students to make sense of the information they have gathered-to synthesize the information into new knowledge. In order to address the different leaning modalities that students possess, teachers should have students use a variety of forms of representation for this sensemaking stage (see Forms of Representation matrix).

Using stories to trigger conversations and intepretations of behaviours is powerful.

Sensemaking is a process designed to enable groups of people to see patterns that were once hidden to them and develop a common understanding of what is required to address an issue. While the sensemaking (and subsequent intervention design) process will result in the production of artefacts (reports, lists of action items, descriptions of the current situation etc) much of the value is derived through participation in the process. It is not a process where you say 'make sense of this and tell me the answer'. Much of the benefit comes from determining 'what it means' for yourself. Sensemaking is beneficial at an individual level as our values and assumptions are tested and either confirmed or found wanting.

Instead of constructing theories like their researcher colleagues, researching clinicians must face their previous constructions (i.e., sensemaking from experience), create methods which allow for deconstruction (i.e., sensemaking challenged), and then work towards building reconstructions (i.e., sensemaking remade) (Dervin, 1992; Duffy, 1995; Shields & Dervin, 1993; Weick, 1995)

This present report summarizes the insights and recommendations of a symposium on sensemaking, sponsored by the Command and Control Research Program (CCRP) of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Command, Control, Communications, and Intelligence, and held in Vienna, Virginia, on 23-25 October 2001.

understanding this content and making decisions based on it (especially in mission-critical situations) is not just a simple matter of consuming information. To effectively "make sense" of large, heterogeneous, and often unstructured content collections requires: - efficient, accurate, and context-based ways of extracting, filtering, and summarizing information; - better and more meaningful ways of organizing, visualizing, and interacting with the information; - faster, more objective methods for investigating hypotheses, detecting trends or patterns across multiple sources, and otherwise analyzing or interpreting information.

Sensemaking systems don't only help people find stuff faster. That's just the information retrieval part. The bigger story is about augmenting and amplifying our abilities to make sense. Sensemaking adds things like skimming, power reading, organizing, spotting patterns, tracing social networks, taking notes, summarizing, drilling for details, and flagging biases. Reading an article is different from reading a book, and that's different from reading from a collection or stream. Radically new forms of human-information interaction are being enabled by these new technologies. Sensemaking systems not only have front ends (visualization), but also back ends (content analytics and reasoning).

This ethnographic study investigates how a project group deals with the contradiction between distributed knowledge in boundary-spanning collaborative processes and the expectation that software systems will provide unified, codified knowledge. Group and individual activities were observed over a period of 18 months, to examine the ways knowledge was presented, recognized, shared, or otherwise managed during joint design of business process and IT systems change. The study explores how knowledge and expertise were translated across organizational boundaries, and identifies four stages in the development of group understanding of how to manage sensemaking and expertise across knowledge boundaries: focus on defining shared goals; acknowledging and sharing tacit knowledge about organizational practice; identifying external influences; and explicit knowledge generation.

Yes, knowledge management is the hottest subject of the day. The question is: what is this activity called knowledge management, and why is it so important to each and every one of us? The following writings, articles, and links offer some emerging perspectives in response to these questions. As you read on, you can determine whether it all makes any sense or not.

Using segments of rich media makes it possible to aggregate context and meaning on these chunks by using a number of different mechanisms. Starting with a granular node -- be it a sound bite, visual clip or written fact -- it is possible to aggregate contextual metadata through a series of steps that emergently progress from: * Starting with thousands of defined Audio Sound Bites & visual clips * Rating sound bites and clustering them with folksonomy tags * Sequencing audio sound bites within playlists * Collaboratively building larger sequences with nested playlists * Independently controlling the video & audio tracks with 2-dimensional nested playlists * Evaluating Multiple Storylines and Hypotheses with a 2-dimensional playlist matrix * Visualizing complex networks by mapping out feedback loop relationships between nodes

See also: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/semantic-web/2008Apr/0005.html NaturalOWL is an open-source natural language generation engine written in Java. It produces descriptions of individuals (e.g., items for sale, museum exhibits) and classes (e.g., types of exhibits) in English and Greek from OWL DL ontologies. The ontologies must have been annotated in RDF with linguistic and user modeling resources. We demonstrate a plug-in for Protege that can be used to produce these resources and to generate texts by invoking NaturalOWL. We also demonstrate how NaturalOWL can be used by robotic avatars in Second Life to describe the exhibits of virtual museums. NaturalOWL demonstrates the benefits of Natural Language Generation (NLG) on the Semantic Web. Organizations that need to publish information about objects, such as exhibits or products, can publish OWL ontologies instead of texts. NLG engines, embedded in browsers or Web servers, can then render the ontologies in multiple natural languages, whereas computer programs may access the ontologies directly.