lightweight personal sensemaking tools for the web
Sensemaking is an ill-defined, iterative and complex activity concerned with the way people approach the process of collecting, organizing and creating representations of information. The user needs to be supported in two cognitive tasks: 'representation construction', which involves finding an appropriate structure to aid sensemaking and 'encoding', which is populating that structure with meaningful information. Much work has been completed in the area of encoding, but the forms of representation construction and how they can be better supported in software require further investigation. This paper reports on the design, implementation and evaluation of a web-based personal sensemaking tool called Coalesce. It tightly integrates search facilities with the representation construction task through the SenseMap - an innovative interactive hierarchical mechanism for displaying, structuring and storing selected information. Results from controlled experiments indicate that Coalesce enhances users' searching, gathering and organizing tasks when compared to a standard browser and word processor combination, but without imposing an additional cognitive load.
personal sensemaking representation construction personal information management tagging