Facilitate Humanities Researchers in Sensemaking and Information Seeking Tasks Yan Qu School of Information

Project Overview What’s the research problem? –How could a software system facilitate humanities researchers in their sensemaking and information seeking tasks? Why it’s important? –Sensemaking and information seeking activities are ubiquitous in our research activities. The better support for these activities could result in efficient and high quality research work. What has been done? –Various sensemaking and information-seeking related theories –Existing systems What is my approach? –Study of sensemaking and infomration seeking behavior –System design and implementation –System evaluation

Presentation Outline Introduction to the research problem Study of sensemaking and information seeking behaviors with the emphasis on sensemaking tasks conducted by humanities researchers. How such study informs the system design Related systems System design –System framework –Functions support sensemaking and information gathering System evaluation

Research Problem How could a software system facilitate humanities researchers in their sensemaking and information seeking tasks

Research Methodology Study of sensemaking and information seeking behaviors with the emphasis on sensemaking tasks conducted by humanities researchers. –Review general theory about sensemaking and information seeking –Investigate how humanities researchers conduct sensemaking and information seeking activities –Review theory about academic reading and writing How such study informs the design of software systems that support sensemaking and information seeking activities System design and implementation System evaluation

Theories of Sensemaking and Information Seeking Dervin’s sensemaking model Russell et al’s sensemaking model Information seeking model Integrated model of sensemaking and information seeking

Dervin’s Sensemaking Model Dervin’s sensemaking triangle show the close relationship between sensemaking and information seeking activities

Russell et al’s Sensemaking Model Russell’s sensemaking model posits the use of representations in service of accomplishing some tasks.

Information Seeking Cycle Information seeking is a rich heterogeneous and iterative process. [Bates 1989] [Pirolli and Card, 1995]

Combined Model of Sensemaking and Information Seeking Sensemaking and information seeking are always happened together and interweave with each other Representation plays a central role in this model

Design Implication (Part 1) Support Sensemaking –Support storage and editing of multiple representations –Give suggestions on organizing the collected Information –Show different facets of the information –View representation at different granularities Support Information Gathering –Help express the information needs –Organize search results

How Humanities Researchers Conduct Their Sensemaking and Information Seeking Tasks (1) The study of “The Night before Christmas” -- Stephen Nissenbaum –Study of the role the poem played in historical social change. –Moore’s poem was about the privatization of Christmas. And the poem itself seems to have played an important role in bringing about that change. What we see in this sample of humanities research –The representation of knowledge is gradually evolved. –Search in wide range of information resources. –Various activities are involved: information selection, categorization, connection, reasoning, comparison, etc..

How Humanities Researchers Conduct Their Sensemaking and Information Seeking Tasks (2) Research methodology –Qualitative “data”/observation, qualitative reasoning, non- experimental Research Process/Activities –Gathering data (mostly qualitative, primary and secondary sources) –Process/understand data: organize, interpret, qualitatively reasoning, etc. –Writing and publishing Features: –Wide variety of data resources –Intensive information related activities: organization, connection, aggregation, comparison, reasoning, and interpretation.

Design Decision Mainly focus on support of sensemaking activities Support organizing collected information Support reading and writing Scenario that resembles typical sensemaking and information seeking actives in humanities research: a researcher constructs a paper outline.

Reading as a Sensemaking Activity “Readers do not ‘receive’ information. They approach reading in the context of the entire world of their experience, and they turn away with that world confirmed, modified, extended, or challenged” [Gerald, 1994] “Reading is thinking stimulated by print” [Vaughn 1984], it includes various of activities: categorization; comparing, connecting and organizing ideas; clarifying, generating questions; analyzing, synthesizing… [Gerald, 1994] People’s writing are representations of their knowledge. Reading is a process transferring other knowledge representation to our own.

Writing as Construction [Bolter, 2001] A writer begin with a jumble of verbal ideas and only a vague sense of how these ideas will fit together. He may start by laying out topics in an arrangement less formal than an outline: he may organize by association rather that strict subordination. Then the writer trims his network by removing connections and establishing subordination until there is a strict hierarchy.

Design Implication (Part 2) Facilitate reading comprehension –Help note taking –Give suggestions on organizing the collected Information (same as part 1) –Show different facets of the information (same as part 1) Support outline generation –Support brainstorming and idea formation –Help representation shift from network to tree representation

Design Implication (Repeat) Support storage and editing of multiple representations Give suggestions on organizing the collected Information Show different facets of the information Help note taking View representation at different granularity Support brain storming and idea formation Help representation shift from network to tree representation Help express the information needs Organize search results Support the iterative information seeking process

Related systems Research systems: –NoteCrads [Halasz, Moran, and Trigg, 1987] –gIBIS [Conklin and Begeman, 1998] –SenseMaker [Bell, 1997] –SenseMaker [Baldonado and Winograd, 1997] –PowerBookmarks [Li, et al, 1999] Brainstorming software: –MindManager –ThoughtPath Bookmark manager: –Check&Get –Private Bookmarks

My Approach Differs in: A software system is designed to facilitate humanities researchers in their sensemaking and information seeking tasks. I take as central to my approach the representation search and shift in sensemaking; Machine learning techniques are intensively used to provide automatic features in information organization and presentation structure manipulation.

System Design - Interface

System Design - Structure

Features to Support Sensemaking Support Sensemaking –Support storage and editing of network and tree representations –Give suggestions on organizing the collected Information –Show different facets of the information –Note taking functionalities –Help generate the outline

System Function – Basic Tree Editing

System Function – Basic Network Editing

System Function – Clustering/Classification

Clustering/Classification Algorithms Feature Selection –Document frequency thresholding (DF) –Information gain(IG) Clustering algorithm - Single-linkage clustering algorithm Classification algorithm - Semi- Supervised KNN

System Function – Tree Structure Comparison Two sub-trees from different category schemes are selected, and a node from one sub-tree is colored if it is also appears in another sub-tree.

System Function – Note Taking

System Function – Search

System Functions Under Development Outline editing tools Support transformation from network representation to outline Export outline into XML format

System Evaluation Qualitative test –Study how doctoral student in humanities using this system in their research. Observation + Interview Find out if the system is helpful in those student’s research Find out the advantage and disadvantage of using this system, comparing to how the students do the tasks before. Quantitative test –Study whether users who use this system come with better sensemaking results than users who don’t use this system. How to define “better performance” in sensemaking tasks?

Questions ?