*CHI 2018 Workshop: "Sensemaking in a Senseless World" **- Call For Participation * We are seeking workshop papers on topics in the area of sensemaking for a workshop to be held at CHI 2018 in Montreal, Canada. Making sense of information is central to HCI as people look to understand complex systems, domains and problems. Broadly, we take the topic of sensemaking to mean understanding of how people collect and organize information for analysis and synthesis, and the tools and processes they follow when doing this. Sensemaking, per se, is everywhere in the systems we build and in the domains we study. Whenever people need to function well with data, making sense of the information is often a central task. We are interested in both individual and group sensemaking practices—from how one person figures out a complex data set, up to large, collaborative group sensemaking where teams of people assemble and interpret large, complex, interlocking sets of data. Representative tasks include: the practices of people who deal with sensemaking hand-offs (e.g., in a medical setting) or in analytical areas (e.g., making sense of financial data for forensic purposes); data set interpretation; understanding large collections of documents; etc. In particular, what are the tools, techniques and best practices of people who need to make sense of a large amount of complex information? What issues of scale, complexity and coordination arise that are particular to making sense of a complex world? *Workshop date: *Saturday, April 21, 2018 (Montreal, Canada) at the CHI conference (https://chi2018.acm.org/) *Workshop Goals* The workshop will include research in areas such as: - how do people make sense of complex sets of information? (behavior studies and tool use) • issues of representation creation, evolution and use over time - implicit and explicit aspects of sensemaking - group sensemaking: including different levels of social aggregation, from individual, to group, to large social contexts - both static and evolving problem environments - how sensemaking fits into other knowledge work (information gathering, decision making) - what is sensemaking today? (In particular, what other sensemaking schools of thought are there, and how can we mutually inform each others work?)
From this meeting of the minds, the Sensemaking workshop has several desired outcomes:
- First, we will create working relationships between researchers whose work focuses on aspects of sensemaking. While we certainly hope to bring together those working within the HCI community, we would like to try to bring in some researchers from other disciplines as well, including Library & Information Science (LIS) and Organizational Theory and Psychology (e.g., cognitive/problem solving research). - Our second outcome is to enrich our understanding of sensemaking activities. This includes striving for a shared understanding of the different notions of sensemaking, laying out and structuring the space of varieties of sensemaking (e.g., different levels of social aggregation, static vs. dynamic contexts), articulating their commonalities and differences. - Our third goal is to draw from this is a greater understanding of design implications for improved sensemaking tools, systems and designs. There is a clearly emerging demand for tools for verifiability and trustability of facts shared on public media channels. For example, a new generation of tools is emerging to allow journalists to spot inaccurate or fake news by leveraging ML algorithms and visualizations. Can we take advantage of these tools in our everyday sensemaking tasks as well? *Organizers* - Daniel Russell has been working in the area of sensemaking since the early 1990s. His publication of The cost structure of sensemaking in 1993 led to a stream of research in this area. Now a Senior Research Scientist at Google, he primarily studies how people formulate information needs and satisfy them with online research tools and databases. He has run three earlier CHI workshops on sensemaking, one of which led to a special edition publication of the journal Computer-Human Interaction. - Gregorio Covertino is a Sr. UX Manager and UX Researcher at Cloudera. He has been working on collaborative visualizations for sensemaking since 2003 with his PhD work on multi-role emergency management teams. In addition, he has worked on bias and visualizations for intelligence analysis teams at Xerox PARC. At Informatica and Cloudera, his most recent research work has focused on self-service analytics tools for business users, big data tools for data scientists, and log analytics tools. - Niki Kittur is an Associate Professor and Cooper-Siegel Chair in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. His research explores a future that scales sensemaking beyond the limits of a single individual’s mind by: 1) distributing sensemaking among many people and machines; 2) enabling people to build on the sensemaking that others have already done; and 3) seamlessly integrating human and machine cognition to make sense of large information spaces. He is also a co-founder of DataSquid, a startup that supports sensemaking by bringing the power of intuitive touch and physics to data visualization. - Peter Pirolli has been a long-time contributor to the sensemaking literature, establishing his contributions to this area with the seminal book Information Foraging Theory (2007). His research involves a mix of cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and human-computer interaction, with applications in digital health, sensemaking, and information foraging. - Elizabeth Anne Watkins primarily studies news-producing organizations. News organizations combine the technical and complexity issues typical of bureaucratic systems with the creative, autonomous decision-making of journalists. As more industries face changing labor models, shifting to remote workers and building more of their computing needs on third-party platforms, journalists can serve as a critical early-warning population, a canary- in-the-coal-mine look at the management of cybersecurity in the future of work. For us, sensemaking provides a framework to study how journalists who work in these organizations “make sense” of cybersecurity. *To submit a workshop paper: * If you are interested in submitting or attending the workshop, you can find more details on the workshop website: https://sensemakingworkshop2018.com <https://sensemakingchi2018.com/> For inquiries, please email: dmrussell+sensemaking2081@gmail.com *Deadlines: * The deadline for submitted workshop papers is March 2, 2018. Notification of acceptance will be March 30, 2018.