The plight of the sense-making ape

This is a selective review of the published literature on object-choice tasks, where participants use directional cues to find hidden objects. This literature comprises the efforts of researchers to make sense of the sense-making capacities of our nearest living relatives. This chapter is written to highlight some nonsensical conclusions that frequently emerge from this research. The data suggest that when apes are given approximately the same sense-making opportunities as we provide our children, then they will easily make sense of our social signals. The ubiquity of nonsensical contemporary scientific claims to the effect that humans are essentially--or inherently--more capable than other great apes in the understanding of simple directional cues is, itself, a testament to the power of preconceived ideas on human perception

Heroes and Victims:Fund Manager Sense-making, Self-legitimation and Storytelling

This paper explores how fund managers continue to do their job when on one level they know they cannot all be exceptional. They do this by telling stories, constructing satisfying narratives to explain to themselves, as well as others, why their investments work out and providing equally plausible reasons for when they underperform. Using the story typology of Gabriel (2000. Storytelling in Organizations: Facts, Fictions, and Fantasies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.) – epic, tragic, comic and romantic, we explore two sets of fund manager narratives. First, we analyse the transcripts of interviews with 50 equity fund managers in some of the world's largest investment houses. Second, we examine a similar number of published fund manager reports to their investors. In both cases, we show how storytelling is used by asset managers to make sense of what they do and justify their value to themselves as well their clients and employers. Similar processes are employed in both sets of narratives, one verbal and informal, the other written and formal. Our study serves to highlight how storytelling is an integral part of the work of the professional investor

From Information to Sense-Making: Fetching and Querying Semantic Repositories

Information, its gathering, sharing, and storage, is growing at a very rapid rate. Information turned into knowledge leads to sense- making. Ontologies, and their representations in RDF, are increasingly being used to turn information into knowledge. This paper describes how to leverage the power of ontologies and semantic repositories to turn today’s glut of information into sense-making. This would enable better applications to be built making users’ lives easier and more effective

Social Capital, Sense-Making and Recovery from Disaster: Japanese Companies and the March 2011 Earthquake

The earthquake that hit East Japan in March 2011 caused massive damage, yet despite predictions of widespread disruption to global supply chains, production resumed with remarkable speed. We describe how resources from throughout the networks of stricken companies were mobilized and deployed, enabling rapid restoration of production. We use concepts of social capital and sense-making to explain the speed of recovery. Social capital facilitated rapid mobilization and strategies to build shared mental models permitted effective coordination under complex and evolving conditions. Our findings show that the ability to both mobilize and focus resources is crucial to rapid recovery

Individual emergence in contextual analysis

Located within the tradition of Hermeneutic Dialectics (HD) this paper offers an approach which can further an analysis of a fit between information and organizational systems. Drawn upon Information Systems Development projects a relationship between theory and practice is aided through a multi-disciplinary approach to sense making activity. Using a contemporary version of contextual analysis to understand a way in which individuals construct adapt and create meaning from their environment offers a route to improve a systems analysis process. This type of enquiry into contextual dependencies of knowledge creation can help direct a development of systems that have the intention to serve specific organizational actors and their needs. Combining methods outside of a traditional polar divide, sense making research undertaken within a systems thinking arena can enrich understanding by complementing qualitative and / or quantitative analysis with reflective depth. Drawing together interdisciplinary strands through a critical systems thinking approach offers new levels of professionalism for computer- and management-, practitioners or researchers in the 21st Century

Big Data Visualization Tools

Data visualization is the presentation of data in a pictorial or graphical format, and a data visualization tool is the software that generates this presentation. Data visualization provides users with intuitive means to interactively explore and analyze data, enabling them to effectively identify interesting patterns, infer correlations and causalities, and supports sense-making activities.Comment: This article appears in Encyclopedia of Big Data Technologies, Springer, 201

Will this work for Susan? Challenges for delivering usable and useful generic linked data browsers

While we witness an explosion of exploration tools for simple datasets on Web 2.0 designed for use by ordinary citizens, the goal of a usable interface for supporting navigation and sense-making over arbitrary linked data has remained elusive. The purpose of this paper is to analyse why - what makes exploring linked data so hard? Through a user-centered use case scenario, we work through requirements for sense making with data to extract functional requirements and to compare these against our tools to see what challenges emerge to deliver a useful, usable knowledge building experience with linked data. We present presentation layer and heterogeneous data integration challenges and offer practical considerations for moving forward to effective linked data sensemaking tools