Sensemaking in a Senseless World: 2018 Workshop Abstract

Sensemaking is a common activity in the analysis of a large or complex amount of information. This active area of HCI research asks how DO people come to understand such difficult sets of information? The information workplace is increasing dominated by high velocity, high volume, complex information streams. At the same time, understanding how sensemaking operates has become an urgent need in an era of increasingly unreliable news and information sources. While there has been a huge amount of work in this space, the research involved is scattered over a number of different domains with differing approaches. This workshop will focus on the most recent work in sensemaking, the activities, technologies and behaviors that people do when making sense of their complex information spaces. In the second part of the workshop we will work to synthesize a cross-disciplinary view of how sensemaking works in people, along with the human behaviors, biases, proclivities, and technologies required to support it.