Looking for fraud in digital footprints: sensemaking with chronologies in a large corporate investigation

During extended sensemaking tasks people typically create external representations that integrate information and support their thinking. Understanding the variety, role and use of these is important for understanding sensemaking and how to support it effectively. We report a case-study of a large, document-based fraud investigation undertaken by a law firm. We focus on the construction and use of integrated representations in the form of chronologies. We show how these supported conjecture recording, focussing on time-periods, identifying gaps, identifying connections and reviewing interpretations. We use our findings to highlight limitations of a previous analysis of representations in sensemaking which regards this as schema definition and population. The findings also argue for search tools designed to identify date references in documents, for the support of ad-hoc event selections, and the support of linking between integrating representations and source documents

E-discovery viewed as integrated human-computer sensemaking: the challenge of 'Frames'

In addressing the question of the design on technologies for e-discovery it is essential to recognise that such work takes place through a system in which both people and technology interact as a complex whole. Technology can promote discovery and insight and support human sensemaking, but the question hangs on the extent to which it naturally extends the way that legal practitioners think and work. We describe research at UCL which uses this as a starting point for empirical studies to inform the design of supporting technologies. We report aspects of an interview field study with lawyers who worked on a large regulatory investigation. Using data from this study we describe document review and analysis in terms of a sequence of transitions between different kinds of representation. We then focus on one particular transition: the creation of chronology records from documents. We develop the idea that investigators make sense of evidence by the application of conceptual ‘frames’ (Klein et al’s, 2006), but whilst the investigator ‘sees’ the situation in terms of these frames, the system ‘sees’ the situation in terms of documents, textual tokens and metadata. We conclude that design leverage can be obtained through the development of technologies that aggregate content around investigators’ frames. We outline further research to explore this further

Effective ways to use nonpersonal information in healthcare: report from a workshop held at University College London 15-16 April 2004

New information technologies are being introduced in the UK National Health Service as resources for the acquisition of clinical knowledge. These are forcing working practices to adapt and are affecting and challenging perceived roles, relationships and expectations of patients and health professionals alike. Effective ways to use nonpersonal information in healthcare was a two-day workshop hosted by UCL Interaction Centre at University College London intended to provide a forum for practioners and researchers working in the area of clinical health information delivery to come together to discuss access to health information, and to consider how the various challenges and opportunities relating to electronic information provision can be managed most effectively. For the first day of the workshop, the theme for presentations and discussion was information provision for and access by health professionals. Talks were given by Julius Weinberg (City University, London), Roger Slack (University of Edinburgh) and Anne Adams (University College London). The theme for the second day was information provision and access by patients. Presentations were given by Mig Muller (NHS Direct), Jane Wilson (Whittington Hospital and Medi-notes), Andrew Herxheimer (University of Oxford) and Henry Potts (University College London). On both days, delegates formed into three groups for breakout sessions in which they discussed and reported back on: information quality and use, social and organisational context, and user requirements and training in relation to the respective daily theme (health practitioners/patients). This report summerises each of the presentations and the reports by the breakout groups

Conceptual misfits in email-based current awareness interaction

Purpose - This research aims to identify some requirements for supporting user interactions with electronic current-awareness alert systems based on data from a professional work environment. Design/methodology/approach - Qualitative data was gathered using contextual inquiry observations with twenty-one workers at the London office of an international law firm. The analysis uses CASSM (‘Concept-based Analysis of Surface and Structural Misfits’), a usability evaluation method structured around identifying mismatches, or ‘misfits’, between user-concepts and concepts represented within a system. Findings - Participants were frequently overwhelmed by email alerts, and a key requirement is to support efficient interaction. Several misfits which act as barriers to efficient reviewing and follow-on activities are demonstrated. These relate to a lack of representation of key user-concepts at the interface and/or within the system, including alert items and their properties, source documents, ‘back-story’, primary sources, content categorisations and user collections. Research limitations/implications - Given these misfits we derive a set of requirements to improve the efficiency with which users can achieve key outcomes with current-awareness information as these occur within a professional work environment. Originality/value - The findings will be of interest to current-awareness providers. The approach is relevant to information interaction researchers interested in deriving design requirements from naturalistic studie

Discovery-led refinement in e-discovery investigations: sensemaking, cognitive ergonomics and system design.

Given the very large numbers of documents involved in e-discovery investigations, lawyers face a considerable challenge of collaborative sensemaking. We report findings from three workplace studies which looked at different aspects of how this challenge was met. From a sociotechnical perspective, the studies aimed to understand how investigators collectively and individually worked with information to support sensemaking and decision making. Here, we focus on discovery-led refinement; specifically, how engaging with the materials of the investigations led to discoveries that supported refinement of the problems and new strategies for addressing them. These refinements were essential for tractability. We begin with observations which show how new lines of enquiry were recursively embedded. We then analyse the conceptual structure of a line of enquiry and consider how reflecting this in e-discovery support systems might support scalability and group collaboration. We then focus on the individual activity of manual document review where refinement corresponded with the inductive identification of classes of irrelevant and relevant documents within a collection. Our observations point to the effects of priming on dealing with these efficiently and to issues of cognitive ergonomics at the human–computer interface. We use these observations to introduce visualisations that might enable reviewers to deal with such refinements more efficiently

Improving the cost structure of sensemaking: analysing user concepts to inform information systems design

n many everyday contexts people interact with information systems in order to make sense of a domain of interest. However, what this means and how it can best be supported are poorly understood. In particular, there has been little research on how to develop system representations that simplify naturally occurring sense making processes by matching people’s conceptualizations of the domain. In this paper we draw on Klein et al.’s data-frame theory and Russell at al’s notion of cost-structures in sensemaking to propose an approach to understanding sensemaking that supports reasoning about system requirements. The two key elements of the approach are the identification of the process and the transformational steps within that process that could benefit from support to reduce costs, and the identification of primary concepts which are cued by information in the context of a given sensemaking task and domain, and around which users integrate information to form a structured understanding. Our general principle is that by understanding a sensemaking transformation in terms of its source data and the integrating structures it creates, one is better able to anticipate the evolving information needs that it tends to invoke. We test this approach with a case study of fraud investigation performed by a team of lawyers and forensic accountants and consider how to support the elaboration of prototypical user-frames once they have been invoked

Towards an approach for analysing external representations created during sensemaking using generative grammar

During sensemaking, users often create external representations to help them make sense of what they know, and what they need to know. In doing so, they necessarily adopt or construct some form of representational language using the tools at hand. By describing such languages implicit in representations we believe that we are better able to describe and differentiate what users do and better able to describe and differentiate interfaces that might support them. Drawing on approaches to the analysis of language, and in particular, Mann and Thompson’s Rhetorical Structure Theory, we analyse the representations that users create to expose their underlying ‘visual grammar’. We do this in the context of a user study involving evidential reasoning. Participants were asked to address an adapted version of IEEE VAST 2011 mini challenge 3 (interpret a potential terrorist plot implicit in a set of news reports). We show how our approach enables the unpacking of the heterogeneous and embedded nature of user-generated representations and allows us to show how visual grammars evolve and become more complex over time in response to evolving sensemaking needs