Human Sense-making Research Articles

Determining What’s Next: Visual Analytics for Evaluating Human-Automation Coordination

As advanced automated systems become more complex, there is a greater need to analyze the difficulty of human-automation coordination. We developed a novel visual analytics tool to evaluate human-automation coordination by examining the relationship between projection, explanation (retrojection), and the understanding of current events through time. The What’s Next Diagram visualizes demands on human sensemaking as operators answer Wiener’s key automation surprise question: what will automation do next. The tool can assess whether operators can answer the question directly and quickly given the design and architecture of human-automation systems. It can be used as a model of multi-agent coordination, as a tool for post-mortem analysis, or an aid for design. We illustrate how the tool can be used to identify system requirements for anomaly response in the aviation domain.

“What do I stand for?” - A phenomenological account of an identity crisis in the climate classroom

This single-participant idiographic study examines the implications of a student’s identity crisis in the climate classroom through the lens of existential phenomenology. The study analyses the ontological sense-making process of a mixed-race, bisexual female student reckoning with the racial dimensions of climate change during an environmental course in a liberal arts college in the Netherlands. By delving into the ontological implications of the participant’s experience of the course, the analysis shows that environmental education can meaningfully impact the mind-body relationship and self-identification of students with marginalized identities. The findings challenge some of the assumptions of popular frameworks for understanding marginalization in environmental education, like intersectionality, and post-humanist perspectives. The authors conclude that attending to human sense-making in environmental education can benefit students with marginalized identities by grounding environmental education in practices that make space for these identities.

“Machine Down”: making sense of human–computer interaction—Garfinkel’s research on ELIZA and LYRIC from 1967 to 1969 and its contemporary relevance

AbstractThis paper examines Harold Garfinkel’s work with ELIZA and a related program LYRIC from 1967 to 1969. AI researchers have tended to treat successful human–machine interaction as if it relied primarily on non-human machine characteristics, and thus the often-reported attribution of human-like qualities to communication with computers has been criticized as a misperception—and humans who make such reports referred to as “deluded.” By contrast Garfinkel, building on two decades of prior research on information and communication, argued that the ELIZA and the LYRIC “chatbots” were achieving interactions that felt human to many users by exploiting human sense-making practices. In keeping with his long-term practice of using “trouble” as a way of discovering the taken-for-granted practices of human sense-making, Garfinkel designed scripts for ELIZA and LYRIC that he could disrupt in order to reveal how their success depended on human social practices. Hence, the announcement “Machine Down” by the chatbot was a desired result of Garfinkel’s interactions with it. This early (but largely unknown) research has implications not only for understanding contemporary AI chatbots, but also opens possibilities for respecifying current information systems design and computational practices to provide for the design of more flexible information objects.

Religious heritage and change in the North

The current issue of Approaching Religion is based on a conference arranged in Åbo/Turku, Finland, in November 2022, with the theme ‘Religious Heritage and Change in the North’. The conference was organized jointly by the research network Religious History of the North (REHN, Umeå University), and the research project ‘Changing Spaces: Ritual Buildings, Sacred Objects, and Human Sensemaking’ (Inez and Julius Polin Institute for Theological Research/Åbo Akademi University).

Whither Rough Ground? On the “Ordinary” of Ordinary Aesthetics

AbstractThis article is a criticism of the narrative self-understanding offered by advocates of Ordinary Aesthetics. Even though the frustration with the philosophy of art (in contrast with philosophical aesthetics) is, in many ways, an overdetermined result, the sense of the ordinary as available through the withdrawal of this art-centred concern is misguided. This article argues that the reported death of art and the seemingly consistent suggestion that “anything goes” do not relieve contemporary philosophy from its being situated precisely in the wake of these practices of sense-making. I claim that Ordinary Aesthetics is dealing in an illusory conceit to the extent that defences of Ordinary Aesthetics are indebted to a demand that aesthetics may be a living field of philosophical inquiry today only if the fate of artworks is deleted from that narrative. Arguing this point requires an account of the idea of the death of art, associated with Hegel but perhaps more recently with Danto, and I sketch how Danto’s account does not cohere with the account provided in Ordinary Aesthetics. But because the claim of Ordinary Aesthetics amounts to a claim about the capacities of human sense-making independent of historical trajectories and a sense of the ordinary as that which is just available to a timeless abstraction of the human sensorium, my criticism of Ordinary Aesthetics requires a deeper defence of the relation of the faltering of narratives of art with the philosophical effort to make sense of ordinary experiences. Doing so requires that I provide alternatives: what I regard as two related though quite different philosophical approaches, namely, Cavell’s Ordinary Language Philosophy (which is startlingly absent from defences of Ordinary Aesthetics) and the program of a philosophical aesthetics elaborated in Adorno.

Artificial intelligence for supply chain management: Disruptive innovation or innovative disruption?

AbstractThis article examines the theoretical and practical implications of artificial intelligence (AI) integration in supply chain management (SCM). AI has developed dramatically in recent years, embodied by the newest generation of large language models (LLMs) that exhibit human‐like capabilities in various domains. However, SCM as a discipline seems unprepared for this potential revolution, as existing perspectives do not capture the potential for disruption offered by AI tools. Moreover, AI integration in SCM is not only a technical but also a social process, influenced by human sensemaking and interpretation of AI systems. This article offers a novel theoretical lens called the AI Integration (AII) framework, which considers two key dimensions: the level of AI integration across the supply chain and the role of AI in decision‐making. It also incorporates human meaning‐making as an overlaying factor that shapes AI integration and disruption dynamics. The article demonstrates that different ways of integrating AI will lead to different kinds of disruptions, both in theory and in practice. It also discusses the implications of AI integration for SCM theorizing and practice, highlighting the need for cross‐disciplinary collaboration and sociotechnical perspectives.

Ensuring wholeness: Using Code Biology to overcome the autonomy-heteronomy divide

This paper presents an alternative to Autopoietic Enactivism in the form of a Code Biology-informed account on human sense-making. It demonstrates the possibility of avoiding a dualism between, on the one hand, the autonomy of individual sense-makers and, on the other, the heteronomy of social facts. This is possible because code biological principles are pertinent to different levels of biological and non-biological organization and cut across the organismic self—non-self border. Analytically, one can maintain the overall integrity of an agent as a separable unit of (inter)action while also avoiding an autonomy-heteronomy divide. We therefore emphasise the constitutive role of codified relations that, while irreducible to operational closure, connect the sense-making agent's social interactions to those of other agents. The move grants a central, constitutive role to external norms (or, heteronomy) as altering the internal, embodied integrity of an autonomous agent. Drawing on the case of prosthetics use in amputees, we show that successful integration of a prothesis cannot be reduced to the substitution of a missing limb. Rather, it demands experienced bodily wholeness on the part of the agent which can only be achieved by attuning and adapting to use of a prosthesis while also internalizing social norms and values. It is concluded that many aspects of the living actualize codified relations which incorporate both heteronomous and autonomous traits.

The Digital Mind: How Computers (Re)Structure Human Consciousness

Technologies of communication condition human sense-making. They do so by creating the social environment we inhabit and extending their structural biases and logics through human use. As such, this essay inquires into the prevailing habits of mind in the digital era. Employing a media ecology of communication, I argue that digital computers and microprocessors are defined by three structural properties and, hence, underlying logics: digitization (binary code), algorithmic execution (input/output), and efficiency (machine logic). Repeated exposure to these logics cultivates a digital mind, a model of thinking, communicating, and sense-making characterized by intransigence, impertinence, and impulsivity. I conclude the essay by exploring the broader implications of a digital mind, paying particular attention to the challenges it poses to democratic politics.

Tensions between norms of everyday narrating and legal narrating

AbstractContemporary asylum laws challenge the narratives of migrants and legal professional teams. Struggles arise in requirements to tell the right story defined by legal norms while storytelling in everyday life relies on sociocultural norms. Professionals working with socially and legally vulnerable populations, as in education and asylum cases, can bridge that gap if we understand narrating as a relational process with credibility and coherence developing over time in terms of the clients’ experience and institutional expectations. This paper presents dynamic storytelling methodology to guide such a process, applied successfully with a Roma community seeking inclusion in public education and used to interpret two unsuccessful asylum cases. Drawing on those examples, we conclude by proposing a socio-legal framework for collaborative lawyering in research on clinical legal training. The goal is a narrative process based on legal actors’ awareness that truth acquisition is a human sense-making process framed by human rights norms.

ImageSchemaNet: A framester graph for embodied commonsense knowledge

Commonsense knowledge is a broad and challenging area of research which investigates our understanding of the world as well as human assumptions about reality. Deriving directly from the subjective perception of the external world, it is intrinsically intertwined with embodied cognition. Commonsense reasoning is linked to human sense-making, pattern recognition and knowledge framing abilities. This work presents a new resource that formalizes the cognitive theory of image schemas. Image schemas are dynamic conceptual building blocks originating from our sensorimotor interactions with the physical world, and enable our sense-making cognitive activity to assign coherence and structure to entities, events and situations we experience everyday. ImageSchemaNet is an ontology that aligns pre-existing resources, such as FrameNet, VerbNet, WordNet and MetaNet from the Framester hub, to image schema theory. This article describes an empirical application of ImageSchemaNet, combined with semantic parsers, on the task of annotating natural language sentences with image schemas.

Strategically constructed narratives on artificial intelligence: What stories are told in governmental artificial intelligence policies?

What stories are told in national artificial intelligence (AI) policies? Combining the novel technique of structural topic modeling (STM) and qualitative narrative analysis, this paper examines the policy narratives in 33 countries’ AI policies. We uncover six common narratives that are dominating the political agenda concerning AI. Our findings show that the policy narratives' saliences vary across time and countries. We make several contributions. First, our narratives describe well-grounded, supportable conceptions of AI among governments, and show that AI is still a fairly novel, multilayered, and controversial phenomenon. Building on the premise that human sensemaking is best represented and supported by narration, we address the applied rhetoric of governments to either minimize the risks or exalt the opportunities of AI. Second, we uncover the four prominent roles governments seek to take concerning AI implementation: enabler, leader, regulator, and/or user. Third, we make a methodological contribution toward data-driven, computationally-intensive theory development. Our methodological approach and the identified narratives present key starting points for further research.

Growing donkey ears: the animal politics of music education

ABSTRACT This article problematizes the view that music education is primarily justified on account of its uniquely humanizing influence. Not only does this general humanist argument clearly fail to convince policy-makers to actually revalidate public music education, but moreover it often seems to rest on highly questionable premises. Without contesting the idea itself that music education can be a humanizing agency, we will try to show that such humanization cannot be achieved without acknowledging music’s inhuman, animal forces. While first this paradox is elaborated through a philosophical reading of the Ancient myth of Midas’s donkey ears, a second part will expand on its implications for the political bearing of music’s contemporary public-educational (ir)relevance. Ultimately, we claim that by paying closer attention to the ways in which music allows animal ‘nonsense’ to disrupt processes of collective human sense-making, we can start thinking of practices of music education that might truly engender a renewed sense of humanity.

Geo-societal sense-making

Abstract At present, only geoscientists utilize geoethics. However, geoethics may have broader, societal use. To illustrate this option, one combines theoretical insights that stem from complex–adaptive dynamics, social–ecological systems, semiotic–cultural psychology and geoethics. The following qualitative framework appears. The human niche is a network of complex–adaptive social–ecological systems, which humans conceive and build to sustain themselves. Human sense-making and practices are intrinsic and non-separable parts of the human niche. The feedback of human sense-making and human practices is iterative. The resulting feedback loop is pivotal for the dynamics of social–ecological systems. Geosciences facilitate the understanding of the dynamics of social–ecological systems. Geoethics supports the sense-making of human agents, such as, currently, geoscientists acting in a professional capacity. However, geoethics is not geoscience-specific when promoting to act actor-centric, virtue-ethics-focused, responsibility-focused and knowledge-based. Therefore, geoethics may shape societal practices beyond professional geosciences. By delivering analytical insights as well as resources for affective sense-making, geoethics may enable citizens to mitigate the challenges to their sense-making that complex–adaptive social–ecological systems may pose. Hence, geoethics may offer cultural references (analytical and affective) when human agents (individual, collective and institutional) are facing the complex–adaptive (wicked) features of the human niche, such as anthropogenic pressure or participatory governance.

The Ecological Sensegiving of Human-Natural Organization in an Alaskan Commercial Fishery

This exploratory study contributes to the ongoing effort to build a body of organizational research and theory that focuses on relationships among organizations and natural phenomena. The question guiding this study is, how does organization that is mutually constituted by both humans and nature form in a natural resource extraction context? The logic of this study is that if it is through sensemaking that organization emerges, it is through ecological sensemaking that organization at the frontline of natural resource extraction industries emerges. Yet, no research has been conducted on the ecological sensemaking through which frontline managers in natural resource extraction industries, here commercial fishing captains, make sense of the natural systems upon which they depend for their livelihood, from which human-natural organization emerges. To answer the research question, this study examines the ecological sensemaking of frontline managers in a resource extraction industry. The findings are threefold: First, they provide an analytical framework of the human-natural organization that forms in the natural resource extraction industry analyzed in this study; Second, the findings demonstrate that ecological sensemaking is the assembling process through which human-natural organization continually forms at the frontline of a resource extraction industry; Third, the findings suggest that natural phenomena engage in a sort of sensegiving to the sensemaking of human phenomena, and that it is out of this intra-play of natural sensegiving and human sensemaking that human-natural organization emerges.

Making Sense of Complexity: Using SenseMaker as a Research Tool

There is growing interest in studying processes of human sensemaking, as this strongly influences human and organizational behavior as well as complex system dynamics due to the diverse lenses people use to interpret and act in the world. The Cognitive Edge SenseMaker® tool is one method for capturing and making sense of people’s attitudes, perceptions, and experiences. It is used for monitoring and evaluation; mapping ideas, mind-sets, and attitudes; and detecting trends and weak signals. However, academic literature describing the tool-set and method is lacking. This introduction aims to guide researchers in choosing when to use SenseMaker and to facilitate understanding of its execution and limitations. SenseMaker can provide nuanced insight into system-level patterns of human sensemaking that can provide insight to nudge systems towards more desirable futures, and enable researchers to measure beyond what they know.

Interactive Visual Analytics for Sensemaking with Big Text

Abstract Analysts face many steep challenges when performing sensemaking tasks on collections of textual information larger than can be reasonably analyzed without computational assistance. To scale up such sensemaking tasks, new methods are needed to interactively integrate human cognitive sensemaking activity with machine learning. Towards that goal, we offer a human-in-the-loop computational model that mirrors the human sensemaking process, and consists of foraging and synthesis sub-processes. We model the synthesis loop as an interactive spatial projection and the foraging loop as an interactive relevance ranking combined with topic modeling. We combine these two components of the sensemaking process using semantic interaction such that the human's spatial synthesis actions are transformed into automated foraging and synthesis of new relevant information. Ultimately, the model's ability to forage as a result of the analyst's synthesis activities makes interacting with big text data easier and more efficient, thereby facilitating analysts' sensemaking ability. We discuss the interaction design and theory behind our interactive sensemaking model. The model is embodied in a novel visual analytics prototype called Cosmos in which analysts synthesize structure within the larger corpus by directly interacting with a reduced-dimensionality space to express relationships on a subset of data. We then demonstrate how Cosmos supports sensemaking tasks with a realistic scenario that investigates the affect of natural disasters in Adelaide, Australia in September 2016 using a database of over 30,000 news articles.

Quo vadis pragmatics? From adaptation to participatory sense-making

Before looking forward, the past and present of pragmatics is reflected upon. Two developments are signaled as potentially problematic for the identity of the field. On the one hand, there is inner fragmentation in the field of pragmatics. On the other hand there are developments in neighboring fields like cognitive linguistics and cognitive science, which seek to recontextualize to the social-pragmatic dimension, this way coming closer to pragmatics. The two developments lead to the question what the core profile of pragmatics should be in order to play its own distinctive role in future research on human sense-making.

Revisiting IS research practice in the era of big data

Through building and testing theory, the practice of research animates data for human sense-making about the world. The IS field began in an era when research data was scarce; in today's age of big data, it is now abundant. Yet, IS researchers often enact methodological assumptions developed in a time of data scarcity, and many remain uncertain how to systematically take advantage of new opportunities afforded by big data. How should we adapt our research norms, traditions, and practices to reflect newfound data abundance? How can we leverage the availability of big data to generate cumulative and generalizable knowledge claims that are robust to threats to validity? To date, IS academics have largely welcomed the arrival of big data as an overwhelmingly positive development. A common refrain in the discipline is: more data is great, IS researchers know all about data, and we are a well-positioned discipline to leverage big data in research and teaching. In our opinion, many benefits of big data will be realized only with a thoughtful understanding of the implications of big data availability and, increasingly, a deliberate shift in IS research practices. We advocate for a need to re-visit and extend traditional models that are commonly used to guide much of IS research. Based on our analysis, we propose a research approach that incorporates consideration of big data—and associated implications such as data abundance—into a classic approach to building and testing theory. We close our commentary by discussing the implications of this hybrid approach for the organization, execution, and evaluation of theory-informed research. Our recommendations on how to update one approach to IS research practice may have relevance to all theory-informed researchers who seek to leverage big data.

Anticipatory Care in Potentially Preventable Hospitalizations: Making Data Sense of Complex Health Journeys.

Purpose: Potentially preventable hospitalizations (PPH) are minimized when adults (usually with multiple morbidities ± frailty) benefit from alternatives to emergency hospital use. A complex systems and anticipatory journey approach to PPH, the Patient Journey Record System (PaJR) is proposed.Application: PaJR is a web-based service supporting ≥weekly telephone calls by trained lay Care Guides (CG) to individuals at risk of PPH. The Victorian HealthLinks Chronic Care algorithm provides case finding from hospital big data. Prediction algorithms on call data helps optimize emergency hospital use through adaptive and anticipatory care. MonashWatch deployment incorporating PaJR is conducted by Monash Health in its Dandenong urban catchment area, Victoria, Australia.Theory: A Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) framework underpins PaJR, and recognizes unique individual journeys, their dependence on historical and biopsychosocial influences, and difficult to predict tipping points. Rosen's modeling relationship and anticipation theory additionally informed the CAS framework with data sense-making and care delivery. PaJR uses perceptions of current and future health (interoception) through ongoing conversations to anticipate possible tipping points. This allows for possible timely intervention in trajectories in the biopsychosocial dimensions of patients as “particulars” in their unique trajectories.Evaluation: Monash Watch is actively monitoring 272 of 376 intervention patients, with 195 controls over 22 months (ongoing). Trajectories of poor health (SRH) and anticipation of worse/uncertain health (AH), and CG concerns statistically shifted at a tipping point, 3 days before admission in the subset who experienced ≥1 acute admission. The −3 day point was generally consistent across age and gender. Three randomly selected case studies demonstrate the processes of anticipatory and reactive care. PaJR-supported services achieved higher than pre-set targets—consistent reduction in acute bed days (20–25%) vs. target 10% and high levels of patient satisfaction.Discussion: Anticipatory care is an emerging trajectory data analytic approach that uses human sense-making as its core metric demonstrates improvements in processes and outcomes. Multiple sources can provide big data to inform trajectory care, however simple tailored data collections may prove effective if they embrace human interoception and anticipation. Admission risk may be addressed with a simple data collections including SRH, AH, and CG perceptions, where practical.Conclusion: Anticipatory care, as operationalized through PaJR approaches applied in MonashWatch, demonstrates processes and outcomes that successfully ameliorate PPH.

Engaging Images for Research, Pedagogy, and Practice ed. by Bridget Turner Kelly and Carrie A. Kortegast

Reviewed by: Engaging Images for Research, Pedagogy, and Practice ed. by Bridget Turner Kelly and Carrie A. Kortegast Alexa Johansen Bridget Turner Kelly and Carrie A. Kortegast (Editors). Engaging Images for Research, Pedagogy, and Practice. Sterling: Stylus Publishing, LLC, 2018. 260 pp. Paperback: $29.95. ISBN 978-1-62036-589-2 In Engaging Images for Research, Pedagogy, and Practice, Bridget Turner Kelly and Carrie A. Kortegast brought together a collection of essays that contribute to the scope of research on utilizing visual methods within higher education-based pedagogy and programming. Additionally, this anthology contributes to the broader context of implementing the use of technology within the fields of student affairs and teaching in higher education. According to the text, the term visual methods encompasses multiple education-and technology-based practices that utilize images and is said to contribute to "human sense-making" in that it "challenge[s] spoken or written texts by offering uniquely rich vantage points" that may not be as effectively shared through words (p. 44). A few of the specific visual-based practices reviewed in this book include photo elicitation, which is "a method of interviewing that involves the use of images, researcher-or participant-generated photos, archival photos, or advertisements during the interview process to elicit information from respondents" (p. 18), photovoice, which is an extension of photo elicitation in the use of photos that are participant-generated and serve "as a catalyst for dialogue" from the participant's own voice and perspective (p. 20), and digital visualization, which "centers on providing the technological tools, insights, and assistance students might require" when navigating visual-based projects (p. 129). The organization of the book is reflected in its title; the 14 chapters are divided into three sections that explore visual methods through the following lenses: research, pedagogy, and practice. Each chapter provides readers with specific examples from the visual-based experiences of other educators, [End Page E-23] whether through research, their classroom assignments and discussions, or the student affairs programs they lead on campus. Overall, this anthology is structured to accomplish two important purposes: (1) informing readers on the definitions and developments of different types of visual methods, and (2) providing examples of ways in which educators have incorporated visual methods in their classes and programs, allowing students to benefit from them. The research and content published in this anthology advance contributions to various fields, including arts-based educational research and inquiry, media-or technology-based pedagogies, visual sociology, learning styles and strategies, student development theory, multiculturalism within higher education, and areas related to student engagement and identity development. Given that visual methods are known to evoke deep learning opportunities that have been focused on campus climate, cultural studies, students' personal values and meaning-making, as well as social justice, these essays also reflect the contributions that have been made to the fields of anthropology and sociology. Some chapters refer to a limited amount of research on the usefulness of visual methods in higher education practices. There are published works and entire academic journals that contribute to the study of the effective uses of images and other visuals (e.g., film, video, symbols) in learning and meaning-making processes; however, there is not always a specific focus on higher education settings. Visual Studies, Visual Communication, and the Journal of Visual Culture are three journals that focus on the generation and use of visuals for the purpose of communicating, interpreting, and learning across a wide range of settings and disciplines. Publications mainly contribute to human development and psychology, organizational or community-based culture studies, and arts-based research and pedagogy. The recent research included in Kelly and Kortegast's anthology aligns with much of the existing research—specifically in the emphasis that arts-based, participant-generated visuals communicate unique perspectives and support rich learning experiences. Additionally, previous research on visual methods tend to include studies on visual methods of every form—photos, images, videos, film, art, symbols, settings, and so on. The two unique attributes within Kelly and Kortegast's anthology include (1) a specific focus on the use of images, which is (2) centered solely within the context of higher education. Denton, Kortegast, and Miller (Chapter...