I’ve been thinking for a while now about these two topics. Sensemaking seems like a relatively ‘cool’ topic of late. We had workshopsat CHI on it – Simon Attfield is moving from UCL to Middlesex University to focus on sensemaking there too. The HCIR and Exploratory search community is loving the idea of harder synthesis, comparison, and evaluation search tasks. Yet Information Triage has been a topic of many years, with Cathy Marshall and Frank Shipman writing on of the more seminal papers 13 years ago! Haven’t we moved on?
Well – my first thought was that Information Triage is perhaps simply the outward physical display of human sensemaking. Marshall and Shipman described it as organising items, prioritising them, etc. In fact, triage nurses do this with humans and their metadata when organising the ER (or A&E or whatever). But I think now I’ve taken that definition to be too limited in perspective. I believe, and perhaps I’m not alone in this perspective, that Information Triage is one outward behaviour of one part of sensemaking. Now the first part of that statement is OK – sure there could be several manifestations of sensemaking. The latter part – that triage is an activity of one part of sensemaking – was perhaps more of a realisation step for me.
Here’s my thinking (if your interested) – Triage is one part of information behaviour, or certainly by Godbold’s definition, in that it is actively engaging with information (or interacting with information in context (CFP)). Information behaviours include destroying and avoiding information, and creating it too. Interesting for me, is that I believe sensemaking includes most of not all information behaviours, at least at an abstract trial-and-error phase.
For me this makes the study of sensemaking much more fascinating – as it has to support all information behaviours!? A sensemaking interface goes far beyond a triage interface tied to a seeking interface. It has to have space to create assumed data and destroy mistakes, which means that there has to be provenance and weight and belief involved.
Right – now that that is out – I’m moving on to consider more thoroughly if there are any information behaviours that do not contribute to sensemaking.
I’ve been thinking lately about wisdom. What makes a wise person? I’m sure we all have people who we believe to be wise. I can think of a few, some who are even still wise after several pints of beer. I felt like I had an incremental realisation of what wisdom really is the other night. I’m almost at the point now, where I remember being ‘younger’ and most decisions in life being easy. These days, I know more arguments, counter arguments, and can more easily perceive other peoples points of view – and decisions these days are less obvious. I then better understood the notion of wisdom, in being able to take into account the wider range of understandings, and still know clearly the right answer. This is of course different to ‘clearly knowing the right answer’ because of ignorance, or lack of knowledge.
A learned person – may be one way to think of it in terms of information seeking. The notion of supporting ‘life-long learning’ is one element of exploratory search. Pictures of wise men are often pictures of intelligent men, but were/are they also wise? Wisdom is more than knowledge, its knowing all the facts, reasons, arguments, and then still clearly knowing the right answer, choice, or action. When I’ve seen wisdom in action, the person can make a tough decision with the apparent ease of a simple one.
Webster defines it as ‘Wisdom is knowledge of what is true or right coupled with just judgment as to action; sagacity, discernment, or insight.’ The knowledge here is not just on fact, but on ‘what is true or right’. In some sense, this could be related to sensemaking. Sensemaking, however, is often associated with making sense of lots of external sources of information, or other people. Wisdom, under these descriptions, may be more related to making sense of all your own knowledge.
Regardless, going beyond discovering facts, support for growing wisdom might mean not only presenting results or answers, but highlighting and communicating correctness, authority, or even moral judgment. Assuming everyone could agree on moral judgment, authority, or correctness that is.
Anyway – the post has become a more ramble than an articulate, insightful and wise blog post.
After reading a fascinating series of tweets on what constitues success in collaborative information seeking, between Jeremy Pickens, Sharoda Paul, Brynn Evans, and Gene Golovchinsky this morning (I woke up some hours after the dicussion), it struck me how important the difference between actual and perceived information need is in collaborative searching activities.
In scenarios where a group of friends are working together to organise a holiday, for example, then every member in the group is working on a perceived collective need. If several people are helping one person solve their problem, then the central person is (hopefully) working on an actual information need, but all their helpers are working on a perceived version of that persons need.
Sharoda Paul has been studying collaborative searching behaviour in medical environments. I haven’t asked her directly about it, but in the worst case everyone is working to solve a patients need. All the medical staff are working on perceived information needs, with many, I would suspect, working on perceived versions of other peoples perceived information needs. A nurse might be working to what she thinks the doctor needs to solve the problem they think the patient has.
So what do we know about the difference between actual and perceived information needs? I picked it up in Jarvelin and Ingwersen’s 2004 paper that preceded their big book ‘The Turn‘. The turn talks about it more, but concludes that its relatively underexplored. It appears to be a commonly used term in medical papers about how patients view their illnesses. Related topics, however, have been popular, such as Sensemaking and the elements of communication in collaborative search. Sharoda presented some fascinating work at CHI2009 after her time working at MSR on sensemaking of previous collaborative searchers. Nikhil Sharma has also presented some fascinating work on sensemaking of handovers, between shifts in hospitals for example.
I’m sure the topic has been broached in papers, and is being addressed in part by these related topics, but it seems like collaborative information seeking provides a great opportunity to study perceived and actual information needs, and provide insights back to collaborative search efforts. I’m looking forward to more collaborative search and sensemaking workshops to come! any at CHI2010?
What is the smallest sensemaking problem? What is the very minimum that counts as sensemaking?
A lot of the challenges in this area are group planning problems, handoffs in hospitals, writing essays. These range from big to massive. Whats a small sensemaking problem?
Yesterday I released a planning tool for attending CHI2009. Its had 50 people actually use it in the first 24 hours, and I suspect many more visitors (I should be counting really).
Ive had plenty of feedback already, some improvements to make, but much praise too:
“Excellent Max! – Thanks a lot!”
“This is super! … just having such a planner is a relief! I commend you for such a straight-forward solution.”
“This looks great, can’t wait to get home and put it on my PowerBook and iPod! Thanks so much for doing this!”
and many many more. I’m quite surprised by the response I’ve had. Its, of course, quite generic and easy to apply to another conference. So do contact me if you like. Otherwise enjoy and I’ll see some of you at CHI!
Daniel Tunkelang has brought my attention to another blog entry about some of the tests that Google is carrying out at the moment. As well as letting you view timelines, and a ‘wonder wheel’ of connections, the options it lets you test include adding thumbnails to each search result (something that Ask.com has been doing for a while) and also allowing you to see more than 2 lines of text per result.
This last point is the one that seems rather interesting to me. I’ve heard many a search engine representative talk about getting as many results as possible above the fold (the point where you’d have to scroll to keep reading), and getting the best trade off, therefore, between context and space. Tim Paek et al, at Microsoft Research, studied the idea of flexible snippet lengths back at CHI2004. Its been a long time coming. I proposed back at a SIGIR workshop in 2007 that we just let people choose the size of the each snippet in the preferences, and see how often people change it – and to what? Maybe now we’ll see.
Interestingly, in IEEE Computer in March 2009, Daniel Russell, of Google, wrote an article saying that, for some research, only big corporations with thousands of processors and millions of users can really test small UI changes, among many other things. Well I’m glad that Google is testing this – and I hope we see some results from it too.
