We explore how the availability of a sensemaking tool influences users' knowledge externalization strategies. On a large display, users were asked to solve an intelligence analysis task with or without a bidirectionally linked concept-graph (BLC) to organize insights into concepts (nodes) and relations (edges). In BLC, both nodes and edges maintain "deep links" to the exact source phrases and sections in associated documents. In our control condition, we were able to reproduce previously described spatial organization behaviors using document windows on the large display. When using BLC, however, we found that analysts apply spatial organization to BLC nodes instead, use significantly less display space and have significantly fewer open windows.
@cite_10 investigated collaborative sensemaking on a large display using either Jigsaw @cite_9 or a simple document viewer with highlighting and annotation. They observed that users had fewer documents open with Jigsaw compared to the document viewer, but speculated that this difference was caused by the different window management behaviors of the two sensemaking tools. However, an alternative explanation could be that the users employed different externalization strategies in Jigsaw, so that the actual for multiple document windows was reduced.
@cite_9 @cite_10
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Analyzing and understanding collections of textual documents is an important task for professional analysts and a common everyday scenario for nonprofessionals. We have developed the Jigsaw visual analytics system to support these types of sensemaking activities. Jigsaw’s development benefited significantly from the existence of the VAST Contest Challenge that provided (1) diverse document collections to use as examples, (2) controlled exercises with a set of analytic tasks and solutions for judging results, and (3) visibility and publicity to help communicate our ideas to others. This article describes our participation in a series of VAST Contest Challenge efforts and how this participation helped influence Jigsaw’s design and development. We describe how the system’s capabilities have evolved over time, and we identify the particular lessons that we learned by participating in the challenges. Investigative analysts who work with collections of text documents connect embedded threads of evidence in order to formulate hypotheses about plans and activities of potential interest. As the number of documents and the corresponding number of concepts and entities within the documents grow larger, sense-making processes become more and more difficult for the analysts. We have developed a visual analytic system called Jigsaw that represents documents and their entities visually in order to help analysts examine reports more efficiently and develop theories about potential actions more quickly. Jigsaw provides multiple coordinated views of document entities with a special emphasis on visually illustrating connections between entities across the different documents. Existing information-visualization techniques that target small screens are usually limited to exploring a few hundred items. In this article we present a scatterplot tool for personal digital assistants that allows the handling of many thousands of items. The application's scalability is achieved by incorporating two alternative interaction techniques: a geometric-semantic zoom that provides smooth transition between overview and detail, and a fisheye distortion that displays the focus and context regions of the scatterplot in a single view. A user study with 24 participants was conducted to compare the usability and efficiency of both techniques when searching a book database containing 7500 items. The study was run on a pen-driven Wacom board simulating a PDA interface. While the results showed no significant difference in task-completion times, a clear majority of 20 users preferred the fisheye view over the zoom interaction. In addition, other dependent variables such as user satisfaction and subjective rating of orientation and navigation support revealed a preference for the fisheye distortion. These findings partly contradict related research and indicate that, when using a small screen, users place higher value on the ability to preserve navigational context than they do on the ease of use of a simplistic, metaphor-based interaction style In this paper, we present the results of a user study on exploratory search activities in a social science digital library. We conducted a user study with 32 participants with a social sciences background—16 postdoctoral researchers and 16 students—who were asked to solve a task on searching related work to a given topic. The exploratory search task was performed in a 10-min time slot. The use of certain search activities is measured and compared to gaze data recorded with an eye tracking device. We use a novel tree graph representation to visualise the users’ search patterns and introduce a way to combine multiple search session trees. The tree graph representation is capable of creating one single tree for multiple users and identifying common search patterns. In addition, the information behaviour of students and postdoctoral researchers is being compared. The results show that search activities on the stratagem level are frequently utilised by both user groups. The most heavily used search activities were keyword search, followed by browsing through references and citations, and author searching. The eye tracking results showed an intense examination of documents metadata, especially on the level of citations and references. When comparing the group of students and postdoctoral researchers, we found significant differences regarding gaze data on the area of the journal name of the seed document. In general, we found a tendency of the postdoctoral researchers to examine the metadata records more intensively with regard to dwell time and the number of fixations. By creating combined session trees and deriving subtrees from those, we were able to identify common patterns like economic (explorative) and exhaustive (navigational) behaviour. Our results show that participants utilised multiple search strategies starting from the seed document, which means that they examined different paths to find related publications.