sources of structure in sensemaking
A critical aspect of sensemaking is finding appropriate representations for information important to a task. As background for the design of future systems to help people in finding such representations, this paper reports a study of where people currently get aspects of structure for their representations Results show that representation construction and information seeking are closely coupled, as people get aspects of structure top down deducing from their previous knowledge, bottom up inducing from facts they find, and by borrowing from previous sensemaking efforts of others. The findings suggest important revisions of previous sensemaking theories and new opportunities for system design.
sensemaking representations information seeking