Simon Attfield

Information seeking and use by newspaper journalists

Reports an interview study into information seeking and use by journalists at a national British newspaper. Describes work activity in the context of a series of behaviour shaping constraints and cognitive and external resources. Describes the journalists information seeking as motivated by originality checking (of the angle), developing a personal understanding, discovering/confirming potential content and also describes information gathering and managing multiple information spaces. Shows how these are motivated by context, facilitated by resources, and how they enrich the journalists resource space. Also shows that journalistic work is uncertain as a function of an uncertain context and their continually evolving plans. These result in provisional and unstable relevance judgments, and, during later stages, the reinitiating of preparatory information seeking activities, including the relocation and review of previously read documents. At the end presents a model to summarise the findings.

Information seeking in the context of writing - A design psychology interpretation of the "problematic situation"

Information seeking does not occur in a vacuum but invariably is motivated by some wider task. It is well accepted that to understand information seeking we must understand the task context within which it takes place. Writing is amongst the most common tasks within which information seeking is embedded. This paper considers how writing can be understood in order to account for embedded information seeking. Following Sharples, the paper treats writing as a design activity and explore parallels between the psychology of design and information seeking. Significant parallels can be found and ideas from the psychology of design offer explanations for a number of information seeking phenomena. Next, a design-oriented representation of writing tasks as a means of providing an account of phenomena such as information seeking uncertainty and focus refinement is developed. The paper illustrates the representation with scenarios describing the work of newspaper journalists.

Making sense of digital footprints in team-based legal investigations: the acquisition of focus

Sensemaking occurs when people face the problem of forming an understanding of a situation. One scenario in which technology has a particularly significant impact on sensemaking and its success is in legal investigations. Legal investigations extend over time, are resource intensive, and require the sifting and re-representation of large collections of electronic evidence and close collaboration between multiple investigators. In this article, we present an account of sensemaking in three corporate legal investigations. We summarize information interaction processes in the form of a model which conceptualizes processes as resource transformations triggered and shaped by both bottom-up and top-down resources. The model both extends upon and validates aspects of a previous account of investigative sensemaking (Pirolli & Card, 2005) and brings to the fore two kinds of focusing. Data focusing involves identifying and structuring information to draw out facts relevant to a given set of investigation issues. Issue focusing involves revising the issues in the light of new insights. Both are essential in sensemaking. We draw this distinction through detailed accounts of two activities in the investigations: reviewing documents for relevance and the creation and use of external representations. This provides a basis for a number of requirements for sensemaking support systems, particularly in collaborative settings, including document annotation; dynamically associating documents of a given type; interacting with documents in fluid ways; linking external representation elements to evidence; filtering external representations in flexible ways; and viewing external representations at different levels of scale and fidelity. Finally, we use our data to analyze the conceptual elements within a “line of inquiry.” This provides a framework that can form the basis for partitioning information into hierarchically embedded inquiry ‘contexts’ within collaborative sensemaking systems.

SensePath: Understanding the Sensemaking Process Through Analytic Provenance

Sensemaking is described as the process of comprehension, finding meaning and gaining insight from information, producing new knowledge and informing further action. Understanding the sensemaking process allows building effective visual analytics tools to make sense of large and complex datasets. Currently, it is often a manual and time-consuming undertaking to comprehend this: researchers collect observation data, transcribe screen capture videos and think-aloud recordings, identify recurring patterns, and eventually abstract the sensemaking process into a general model. In this paper, we propose a general approach to facilitate such a qualitative analysis process, and introduce a prototype, SensePath, to demonstrate the application of this approach with a focus on browser-based online sensemaking. The approach is based on a study of a number of qualitative research sessions including observations of users performing sensemaking tasks and post hoc analyses to uncover their sensemaking processes. Based on the study results and a follow-up participatory design session with HCI researchers, we decided to focus on the transcription and coding stages of thematic analysis. SensePath automatically captures users sensemaking actions, i.e., analytic provenance, and provides multi-linked views to support their further analysis. A number of other requirements elicited from the design session are also implemented in SensePath, such as easy integration with existing qualitative analysis workflow and non-intrusive for participants. The tool was used by an experienced HCI researcher to analyze two sensemaking sessions. The researcher found the tool intuitive and considerably reduced analysis time, allowing better understanding of the sensemaking process.

INVISQUE as a tool for intelligence analysis: the construction of explanatory narratives

This article reports an exploratory user study in which a group of civil servants with experience of, or involvement in, intelligence analysis used the tool INVISQUE to address a problem using the 2011 VAST data set. INVISQUE uses a visual metaphor that combines searching, clustering, and sorting of document surrogates with free-form manipulation on an infinite canvas. The study looks into exposing the behaviors and related cognitive strategies that users would employ to better understand how this and similar environments might better support intelligence type work. The results include the observation that the search and spatial features of the system supported participants in establishing, elaborating, and systematically evaluating explanatory narratives that accounted for the data. Also, visual persistence at the interface allowed them to keep track of searches and to re-find documents when their importance became apparent. The article concludes with reflections on our findings and propose a set of guidelines for developing systems that support sensemaking.

Discovery-led refinement in e-discovery investigations: sensemaking, cognitive ergonomics and system design

Given the very large numbers of documents involved in e-discovery investigations, lawyers face a considerable challenge of collaborative sensemaking. We report findings from three workplace studies which looked at different aspects of how this challenge was met. From a sociotechnical perspective, the studies aimed to understand how investigators collectively and individually worked with information to support sensemaking and decision making. Here, we focus on discovery-led refinement; specifically, how engaging with the materials of the investigations led to discoveries that supported refinement of the problems and new strategies for addressing them. These refinements were essential for tractability. We begin with observations which show how new lines of enquiry were recursively embedded. We then analyse the conceptual structure of a line of enquiry and consider how reflecting this in e-discovery support systems might support scalability and group collaboration. We then focus on the individual activity of manual document review where refinement corresponded with the inductive identification of classes of irrelevant and relevant documents within a collection. Our observations point to the effects of priming on dealing with these efficiently and to issues of cognitive ergonomics at the human–computer interface. We use these observations to introduce visualisations that might enable reviewers to deal with such refinements more efficiently.

Idea generation and material consolidation: tool use and intermediate artefacts in journalistic writing

We report an in-depth, longitudinal study of a freelance music journalist writing a feature article. Our analysis attends to the participant’s activities from initiation to completion, and the ways in which she established structure using tools and artefacts to support cognitive effort. We observed five work stages: establishing an initial idea; preparing for an interview; interviewing; planning the article; and writing. Each resulted in the production of a working document embodying ideas and commitments which provided a key resource for the next stage. Stages began with phases of ideageneration during which ideas were spontaneously triggered through intense engagement with information resources. They finished with phases of material consolidation when intermediate artifacts were configured to facilitate generation during the next stage. We examine these in detail and use our findings to motivate a discussion of working document overview representations and specific requirements related to idea generation and material consolidation.

Electronic resource discovery systems: from user behaviour to design

Information seeking is a central part of academic development for both students and researchers. However, this is often hindered by complex and highly complicated electronic resource discovery systems. One approach to improving these resources is to understand the difficulties and likely causes of problems when using current systems and how people develop their searching, retrieval and storage strategies. These might provide useful information about the requirements for future design. In this paper we present our findings from UBiRD, a project investigating user search behaviour in electronic resource discovery systems based on a qualitative study of 34 users from three UK universities. We then describe how the information gathered during the study helped inform the design of INVISQUE, a novel non-conventional interface for searching and querying on-line scholarly information. In addition, the theories and design principles used during the INVISQUE design are discussed.

Improving the Cost Structure of Sensemaking Tasks: Analysing User Concepts to Inform Information System Design

In many everyday contexts people interact with information systems in order to make sense of a domain of interest. However, what this means and how it can best be supported are poorly understood. In particular, there has been little research on how to develop system representations that simplify naturally occurring sense making processes by matching peoples conceptualizations of the domain. In this paper we draw on Klein et al.s data-frame theory and Russell at als notion of cost-structures in sensemaking to propose an approach to understanding sensemaking that supports reasoning about system requirements. The two key elements of the approach are the identification of the process and the transformational steps within that process that could benefit from support to reduce costs, and the identification of primary concepts which are cued by information in the context of a given sensemaking task and domain, and around which users integrate information to form a structured understanding. Our general principle is that by understanding a sensemaking transformation in terms of its source data and the integrating structures it creates, one is better able to anticipate the evolving information needs that it tends to invoke. We test this approach with a case study of fraud investigation performed by a team of lawyers and forensic accountants and consider how to support the elaboration of prototypical user-frames once they have been invoked.

How analysts think (?): inference making strategies

In this paper we present early observations of how seven criminal intelligence analysts think and how the make inferences. We used the Critical Decision Method to identify the causal mechanisms of how they think and reason, i.e. how they organize, structure and assemble their information, understandings and inferences. We envisaged that this would enable us to design software to support the structuring of arguments and the evidential reasoning process. Our early observations suggest that analytic reasoning is not straight-forward, but appears chaotic and haphazard, and sometimes cyclic; and that inference making – abduction, induction and deduction – are not independent processes, but are closely intertwined. These processes interact dynamically, each producing outcomes that become anchors used by the others.