Sensemaking: What is it today?

Sensemaking is a common activity in the analysis of a large or complex amount of information. It has also been an active area of research for at least 25 years. Such an active area of HCI research over a quarter century asks fundamental questions about how do people come to understand difficult sets of information? How do they find the data? How do their sensemaking frames help (or hinder) their ability to understand? 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. We will also attempt to synthesize sensemaking work over the past several years. In the second part of the workshop we will synthesize a cross- disciplinary view of how sensemaking works in people, along with the human behaviors, biases, proclivities, and technologies required to support it.