Last year in Florence
 (I think it was) Stu Card asked:
“Are we even talking about the
same thing?”
 I’m still not sure
Informational Experiential
Sensemaking Sensemaking

Coherence, Engagement, and Usefulness
as Sensemaking Criteria in
Participatory Media Practice
Sensemaking Workshop, ACM CHI 2009 Conference, Boston
Al Selvin * **
Simon Buckingham
Shum *
* Knowledge Media Institute
Open University
Milton Keynes, UK MK7 6AA
** Verizon Information Technology
White Plains, NY USA 10604

This talk describes…
 How the concepts of coherence,
engagement, and usefulness…
 …can contribute to an understanding of
practitioner sensemaking…
 …in the context of participatory media
practice
Current PhD research at the Knowledge Media Institute,
Open University UK (advisor: Simon Buckingham Shum)

Practitioner sensemaking
 A teacher stands in front of a class,
lecturing on a math problem, when a
student asks an unexpected question
 A doctor gives a healthy patient their
annual physical exam, and suddenly
comes across a lump
 A guitarist in the middle of a jazz
improvisation hears the drummer
change to an unusual beat
An anomaly is encountered in the course of events,
requiring action (often improvised) in response

Participatory media
Involving participants
in the creation of media
artifacts

Participatory media practitioner
 The person(s) orchestrating
the participatory event,
responsible for its success
 Concerned with the quality of
the representation and the
participants’ relationship to it
 Varying levels of intervention;
not necessarily the ones with
their hands on the equipment

Participatory hypermedia
Collaborative, real-time shaping of
a hypermedia artifact

A framework for participatory
hypermedia practice

Specific focus
 Practitioner moves and choices in
participatory hypermedia sessions
 How these contribute to the ways in which
participants engage with the media artifacts
 Special emphasis on the character of the real-
time shaping of the representation
 Not focusing on whether the tool/approach
“works”
 Rather, what’s the human experience of trying to
make them work for participants

Setting
Workshops held at NASA Ames
And Rutgers University in 2007
Participants and practitioners had
varying levels of experience with
the tools

Setting

Format for the workshops
 Small groups given a common task
 Working from a prepared set of images,
construct a collaborative representational
task for the large group
 Each group given 1 hour to plan a 15
minute session
 Large group sessions
 Typically, one person would act as mapper
and one as facilitator
 Each group took a different direction

Analytical tools
Shaping CEU Narrative Grid Framing
form analysis description analysis analysis

Analytical tools
Shaping CEU Narrative Grid Framing
form analysis description analysis analysis
Characterizing the
representational character
of the whole session
What kind of shaping took place?

Analytical tools
Shaping CEU Narrative Grid Framing
form analysis description analysis analysis
Mapping the coherence,
engagement, and usefulness
dimensions of each timeslot to
build up a signature for the
session
Aids in identifying sensemaking
episodes

Analytical tools
Shaping CEU Narrative Grid Framing
form analysis description analysis analysis
Rich description of
sensemaking episode

Analytical tools
Shaping CEU Narrative Grid Framing
form analysis description analysis analysis
Increasing theoretical sensitivity
Characterizing the
practitioner actions
during the episode in
aesthetic, ethical, and
experiential terms
(informed by theoretical
framework)

The CEU criteria
 Coherence
 keeping the hypermedia representation and participant
interactions understandable, clear, evocative, and organized
 Engagement
 the relationship of participants to the artifact
 looking at it, talking about it, referring to it, and involved in its
construction or reshaping
 Usefulness
 the extent to which the representation appears to be adding
value for the participants and helping to fulfill the goals of the
session

CEU grid
Narrative
descriptions
of the
activities in
each 30
second
timeslot
CEU
ratings for
Coherence
each
Engagement
timeslot
Usefulness
Absolute and
Coherence
relative timing
descriptions for
(bottom two rows
each timeslot
are timings from
video recordings)
Engagement
descriptions
Screenshots
Usefulness when display
descriptions had changed
significantly

Comparing CEU across sessions
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
Ames Group 1 C
E
U Low Medium High
Numeric Numeric Numeric
Ames Group 2 C rating Color rating Color rating Color
E 1 2 3
U
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
Ames Group 3 C
E Good places to look for
U
discontinuities &
Ames Group 4 C sensemaking moments
E
U
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
Rutgers Group 1 C Good places to look at
E how (relative) equilibrium
U
was fostered and
Rutgers Group 2 C maintained
E
U
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
Ames Rutgers
Group 1 Group 2 Group 3 Group 4 Group 1 Group 2
Coherence 2.2 1.5 2.3 2.7 3.0 2.9
Engagement 2.7 2.0 2.6 2.9 2.9 2.9
Usefulness 2.0 1.4 2.2 2.8 2.8 3.0
Overall 2.3 1.7 2.4 2.8 2.9 3.0

What does this get us?
 Insights into how shaping of participatory media
artifacts takes place, and the character of
practitioner sensemaking in situ
 Working towards a methodology for
characterizing the ethical dimensions of
(participatory) media practice
 Development of practitioner education and
improved software support
Making a complex phenomenon visible and
fostering reflective practice

This research is part of…
kmi.open.ac.uk/projects/hyperdiscourse
compendium.open.ac.uk/institute knowledgeart.blogspot.com