Space for Two to Think: Large, High-Resolution Displays for Co-located Collaborative Sensemaking

Large, high-resolution displays carry the potential to enhance single display groupware collaborative sensemaking for intelligence analysis tasks by providing space for common ground to develop, but it is up to the visual analytics tools to utilize this space effectively. In an exploratory study, we compared two tools (Jigsaw and a document viewer), which were adapted to support multiple input devices, to observe how the large display space was used in establishing and maintaining common ground during an intelligence analysis scenario using 50 textual documents. We discuss the spatial strategies employed by the pairs of participants, which were largely dependent on tool type (data-centric or function-centric), as well as how different visual analytics tools used collaboratively on large, high-resolution displays impact common ground in both process and solution. Using these findings, we suggest design considerations to enable future co-located collaborative sensemaking tools to take advantage of the benefits of collaborating on large, high-resolution displays

Project Testbed: Argument Mapping and Deliberation Analytics

One key goal of the Catalyst project was to design metrics that could capture and represent aspects of the conversation’s structural quality, to assist harvesters and moderators. Many such metrics, alerts and visualizations were developed in the course of the project, but initial user testing has shown that users find it difficult to interpret abstract signals. Following that, we have both introduced new analytics that we felt could be more directly useful, and improved the representation of existing ones. We evaluated their usefulness in a smaller conversation and in experimental settings