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Measuring the Tools and Behaviors of Sensemaking

We present a method for assessing one kind of sensemaking behavior — rapid understanding of large document collections — and discuss lessons learned from our attempts to measure representative sensemaking tools and sensemaking behavior. To further our understanding of sensemaking behaviors, we need to move beyond overly constrained and artificial measurements of easily instrumented behavior. From observations, we know sensemaking is often performed under time pressure and requiring use of large document collections. Instrumenting people in their workplace is often untenable, yet oversimple laboratory studies often miss explanatory richness. We argue that studies of sensemakers need to be done on tests that are closely aligned with the natural tasks of sensemakers. Understanding human performance in such tasks requires analysis that accounts for many of the subtle factors that influence final performance, including the role of background knowledge, variations in reading speed, and tool use costs. Author Keywords Sensemaking; document collections; visualization; measuring analysis work; information retrieval.