Sense and Sensability: Exploring Future Immersive Environments for Scholarly Sensemaking

Scholars must often make sense of vast amounts of complex and diverse scholarly information, much of which is not "senseable": crucial information like questions, concepts, or assertions, along with key properties like truthlikeness or evocativeness, are primarily identified through effortful search or reasoning, rather than direct perception through the senses. In this paper, we explore how we might augment scholarly sensemaking by making the full range of scholarly information more senseable. First, we systematically reviewed systems for scholarly sensemaking, and enumerated key types of scholarly information and their properties. Then, we synthesized design patterns for materializing abstract information in modern artworks, and connected them with our enumerated scholarly information and properties to develop three novel conceptual designs for senseable scholarly sensemaking in immersive environments. Our work lays the foundation for a novel design framework for exploring future immersive environments for scholarly sensemaking.