CAREER: Distributed Sensemaking: Making Sense of the Web Together

该项目将开发基于网络的知识建设环境，用于协作创建信息景观：交互式可视化，支持个人在线参与的意义分析，并捕捉他们的努力，以造福于他们之后的其他人。为了指导和激励这些环境的设计，该研究建立在语义制造理论的基础上，该理论描述了个体寻找、分析和理解信息的嵌套和并行循环，该理论植根于组织行为学、社会和认知心理学以及人机交互的丰富历史。它将把个人语义理论扩展到个人为自己处理的信息被其他人消耗的情况，而其他人的处理反过来又改善了他们之后的人的语义——这可以被称为“分布式语义循环”。以一种既严格又环保的方式检查分布式语义是一个具有挑战性的前景，因此该项目将采取多阶段的方法，包括实验室研究，以表征分布式语义过程并迭代开发接口；“虚拟实验室”实验利用众包在更大范围内评估这些过程和接口，同时引导系统的价值；并控制实地试验，以测试理论和界面在环境有效的设置。为了捕捉生产者和消费者的利益和成本，研究将采用一个实验框架，引出他们的观点。一般的方法是，生产者使用一个界面来完成意义生成任务，消费者执行同样的任务，但从生产者的工作结果开始。这种方法将迭代地开发接口，帮助个人搜索信息，将他们搜索的结果集成到信息环境中，并将他们在过程中参与的判断、决策和工作传达给其他人。这项研究的结果将促进对各个领域的科学理解，包括语义构建、协作、图式归纳和界面设计。这项研究有可能提高知识工作的效率、科学家的培训和实践以及教育的有效性。在这项研究中开发的工具将被纳入和评估教育实践，并将成为与几个现有知识库相联系的社区的中心。

This project will develop web-based knowledge-building environments for the collaborative creation of information landscapes: interactive visualizations that support the sensemaking individuals engage in online, and capture their efforts for the benefit of others who come after them. To guide and motivate the design of these environments, the research builds on theories of sensemaking, which describe the nested and parallel loops through which individuals seek out, analyze, and understand information, grounded in a rich history from organizational behavior, social and cognitive psychology, and human-computer interaction. It will extend theories of individual sensemaking to the situation in which an individual's processing of information for themselves is consumed by others, whose processing in turns improves the sensemaking of those coming after them - what can be called the "distributed sensemaking cycle." Examining distributed sensemaking in a way that is both rigorous and environmentally valid is a challenging prospect, so this project will take a multi-stage approach involving laboratory studies to characterize the distributed sensemaking process and iteratively develop interfaces; "virtual lab" experiments harnessing crowdsourcing to evaluate these processes and interfaces at a larger scale while bootstrapping the system's value; and controlled field trials to test theories and interfaces in environmentally valid settings. In order to capture the benefits and costs to both the producer and the consumer, the research will employ an experimental framework that elicits both of their perspectives. The general approach involves the producer using an interface for a sensemaking task and the consumer doing the same task but starting with the results of the producer's work. This approach will iteratively develop interfaces that help individuals forage for information, integrate the results of their foraging into information landscapes, and convey the judgments, decisions, and work they engaged in during the process to others. The results of this research will advance scientific understanding across a variety of domains, including sensemaking, collaboration, schema induction, and interface design. The research has the potential to improve the efficiency of knowledge work, the training and practice of scientists, and the effectiveness of education. The tools developed in this research will be incorporated and evaluated in educational practice, and will become the center of a community linked to several existing knowledge bases.