sensemaking - Information Matters

When AI tools collapse complex search processes into seamless responses, they can obscure uncertainty, mask gaps in understanding, and smooth over meaningful distinctions of meaning, relevance, and confidence. Users may feel informed without ever confronting the limits of their knowledge or the assumptions guiding how information is interpreted. The challenge for libraries is not just teaching people how to use AI tools, but how to think with them without surrendering judgement.

Featured Translation

April 30, 2024 Christine Urquhart

Making Sense of Sense-making

“Do you see,” “I hear you,” “It doesn’t feel right,” “I smell a rat,” “it tastes funny”—all common phrases we use to express whether or not we are making sense of our situations and interactions. Sense-making involves not only the five senses, but physical, emotional, spiritual, and intuitional responses. We strive to make better sense of our situations and our dealings with other people as uncertainty makes us anxious.

Op/Ed

January 18, 2023 Naresh Agarwal

The world loses a treasure: My interactions with Brenda Dervin

Brenda Dervin, one of the foremost thinkers of our time, died in Seattle, Washington as the year ended on December 31, 2022. She was 85. Along with her Sense-Making Methodology, cats and birds, and interest in reading, writing, poetry, art, and music, among others, she was passionate about “humans who commit their lives to justice and the improvement of the human condition”. She wrote in her university bio, “On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, I consider myself a postmodern modernist. On Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays, a modern postmodernist. On Saturdays, I rest.” She died on a Saturday.

Translation

October 25, 2022 Pengyi Zhang

Collaborative Sensemaking: The Starting Point of Intelligent Information Use by Teams and Groups

Sensemaking, the process of forming meaningful representations of a task or problem’s information space, is the starting point of intelligent information use.