The cost structure of sensemaking

  • Authors:
  • Daniel M. Russell;Mark J. Stefik;Peter Pirolli;Stuart K. Card

  • Affiliations:
  • User Interface Research Area, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Rd., Palo Alto, California;User Interface Research Area, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Rd., Palo Alto, California;User Interface Research Area, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Rd., Palo Alto, California;User Interface Research Area, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Rd., Palo Alto, California

  • Venue:
  • CHI '93 Proceedings of the INTERACT '93 and CHI '93 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
  • Year:
  • 1993

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Making sense of a body of data is a common activity in any kind of analysis. Sensemaking is the process of searching for a representation and encoding data in that representation to answer task-specific questions. Different operations during sensemaking require different cognitive and external resources. Representations are chosen and changed to reduce the cost of operations in an information processing task. The power of these representational shifts is generally under-appreciated as is the relation between sensemaking and information retrieval.We analyze sensemaking tasks and develop a model of the cost structure of sensemaking. We discuss implications for the integrated design of user interfaces, representational tools, and information retrieval systems.