Compendium “makes sense” in Florence (CHI 2008)

Al Selvin and I are in Florence, participating in the Sensemaking workshop at the CHI 2008 (Computer-Human Interaction) conference, the main conference in human-centred computing.

“Sensemaking” has long been a core concept at the heart of our work, drawing on the foundational work of people like Karl Weick and Brenda Dervin. This workshop is possibly the largest recently on the theme, and all agreed at the end of today that there seems to be critical mass to take things forward.

Here are the Dialogue Map notes I took, and all the papers are on the workshop website. Our paper was:

Selvin, A. and Buckingham Shum, S. (2008). Narrative, Sensemaking, and Improvisation in Participatory Hypermedia Construction. Sensemaking Workshop, ACM CHI 2008: Conference on Computer-Human Interaction, Florence, April 6, 2008. [http://kmi.open.ac.uk/projects/hyperdiscourse/docs/Selvin-CHI2008.pdf]

In this paper we describe research into a form of practitioner sensemaking in the context of participatory hypermedia construction sessions, in which groups of people build knowledge maps. We discuss how constructs from narrative theory and improvisation have helped us understand what happens at the moments when practitioners encounter dilemmas and obstacles. We provide brief examples from case studies and discuss possible contributions to broader themes in sensemaking research.

To know more of this work, check out Al Selvin’s work on Knowledge Art & Participatory Hypermedia Construction

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