1993/01/01 by Daniel M. Russell, Mark Stefik, Peter Pirolli +1 · 4 citations
Computer Science · #Data Visualization and Analytics
paper · pdf · doi:10.1145/169059.169209
openalex publication_date 1993/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
Making sense of a body of data is a common activity in any kind of analysis. Sensemaking is the process of searching for a representation and encoding data in that representation to answer task-specific questions. Different operations during sensemaking require different cognitive and external resources. Representations are chosen and changed to reduce the cost of operations in an information processing task. The power of these representational shifts is generally under-appreciated as is the relation between sensemaking and information retrieval.