- Sep 2024
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www.matthewsiu.com www.matthewsiu.com
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Text as a medium for sensemaking. In QDA tools, the “working document” where you make sense of your excerpts might be a spreadsheet, or a database query, or a whiteboard. By contrast, Latticework emphasizes a textual canvas, where freeform notes and snippets can mix arbitrarily. That mainly comes from a difference in the role of the snippets: we view them less as “evidence” or “data points”, and more as “kindling” which might be consumed and discarded on the way to insight. In the latter setting, when even the problem being solved is undefined, the only way forward is often to write in circles, until some sense starts to emerge. This writing may weave chaotically between new observations and snippets from old documents. Some QDA tools, like Dovetail, include freeform text editors, but their affordances emphasize communication to stakeholders, rather than sensemaking.
This is good way to make the distinction with qualitative research tools, incl. those where the narrators of qualitative bits do their own signification which then serves as filters. Tagging like those two types serve a different purpose, spotting patterns 'out there' rather than provoking thinking 'in here'. Both useful and not unrelated, but different activities. The 'evidence' vs 'kindling' metaphors make sense to me. Diff points of application.
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Latticework’s design evolved through many iterations, driven in large part by user interview and observation sessions. Through our personal networks and the Obsidian forum, we recruited experienced Obsidian users who needed to distill some insight from a large collection of unstructured notes. We’d like to discuss some observations from those sessions, and from our own use of the system.
I did #2024/02/01 https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2024/02/matthew-and-andy-watched-me-test-the-obsidian-reference-plugin/ where my own similar observations are captured. - shifting from highlighting to linking as emergence occurs - structure is earned over time - keeping the copy commands straight was hard (I kept forgetting too) - preview and multiple panes is what I did too, but it seemed to clash with the plugin then - selection of snippets is not blocks, but phrases inside par's and sentences. Not whole blocks (and this is why I hardly use block links inside my notes) - after paraphrasing collapsing snippets keeps overview possible, or to collect examples, and treat list as tasks, collapsing when done.
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Latticework’s main goal, then, is to enable fluid movement between these foraging and sensemaking stances. By extension, that means fluid movement between acting on source documents (which emphasize foraging) and on your working document (which emphasizes sensemaking)
Latticework sees foraging as tied to source, and sensemaking as tied to working document, and aims to make the movement between the two fluid, so you can shift focus between the two docs and thus the two activities. It leaves traces of your work in both (vgl [[Hoe emergence tot stand komt 20040513173612]] for the role of such longer traces to more easily stumble across in emergence.)
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when you’re trying to make sense of a confusing situation, you need to get everything into one place, where you can see, rearrange, and elaborate the pieces into a new whole.
Intended effect of Latticework plugin (great name btw) Latticework allows you to fetch snippets in one note, and paste untalterable into another, with a link added in the original and copy. In the new note you can rearrange, paraphrase etc, purposefully add a link to source material, and otherwise do away with the snippet over time. Allows a better overview of what comes from where etc, preventing getting lost in the source material, which often happens.
As annotations already flow into my notes this helps reinforce their use.
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This is the 'final' result of [[Matthew Siu]] [[Andy Matischak]] research into an Obsidian plugin for making sense of several sources into one, emerging an outline. I tested an earlier beta on #2024/02/1 [[Andy Matthew Obsidian plugin]] https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2024/02/matthew-and-andy-watched-me-test-the-obsidian-reference-plugin/ I stopped using it after a few weeks due to clashes with other plugins I could not pin down. At first glance this is a good description of the process and intended purpose. Re-installed this version of the plugin.
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www.druckerforum.org www.druckerforum.org
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Michele Zanini and I recently wrote a brief post for Harvard Business Review about what this sort of change in worldview might mean for business, from strategy to supply chain management. For example, two faculty members at the Center for Strategic Leadership at the U.S Army War College have suggested that AI could fluidly assign leadership roles based on the specific details of a threatening situation and the particular capabilities and strengths of the people in the team. This would alter the idea of leadership itself: Not a personality trait but a fit between the specifics of character, a team, and a situation.
Yes, this I can see, but that's not making AI into K, but embracing complexity and being able to adapt fluidly in the face of it. To increase agency, my working def of K. This is what sensemaking is for, not AI as such.
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- Apr 2024
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snarfed.org snarfed.org
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Old graybeards like me still cling to the web, idolizing Yahoo Pipes and posting faux thinkpieces to our tiny blogs.
ROFL
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- Mar 2024
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jarche.com jarche.com
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read [[Harold Jarche]] in dead blog walking at 20
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- Nov 2023
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docdrop.org docdrop.org
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I'm tempted to say you can look at uh broadscale social organization uh or like Network Dynamics as an even larger portion of that light 00:32:43 cone but it doesn't seem to have the same continuity well I don't you mean uh it doesn't uh like first person continuity like it doesn't like you think it doesn't it isn't like anything to be 00:32:55 that social AG agent right and and we we both are I think sympathetic to pan psychism so saying even if we only have conscious access to what it's like to be 00:33:08 us at this higher level like it's there's it's possible that there's something that it's like to be a cell but I'm not sure it's possible that there's something that there's something it's like to be say a country
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for: social superorganism - vs human multicellular being, social superorganism, Homni, major evolutionary transition, MET, MET in Individuality, Indyweb, Indranet, Indyweb/Indranet, CCE cumulative cultural evolution, symmathesy, Gyuri Lajos, individual/collective gestalt, interwingled sensemaking, Deep Humanity, DH, meta crisis, meaning crisis, polycrisis
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comment
- True, there is no physical cohesion that binds human beings together into a larger organism, but there is another dimension - informational cohesion.
- This informational cohesion expresses itself in cumulative cultural evolution. Even this very discussion they are having is an example of that
- The social superorganism is therefore composed of an informational body and not a physical one and one can think of its major mentations as collective, consensual ideas such as popular memes, movements, governmental or business actions and policies
- I slept on this and this morning, realized how salient Adam's question was to my own work
- The comments here build and expand upon what I thought yesterday (my original annotations)
- The main connections to my own sense-making work are:
- Within our specific human species, the deep entanglement between self and other (the terminology that our Deep Humanity praxis terms the "individual / collective gestalt")
- The Deep Humanity / SRG claim that the concurrent meaning / meta / poly crisis may be an evolutionary test foreshadowing the next possible Major Evolutionary Transition in Individuality.<br />
- https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=MET+in+Individuality
- As Adam notes, collective consciousness may be more a metaphorical rather than a literal so a social superorganism, (one reference refers to it as Homni
- may be metaphorical only as this higher order individual lacks the physical signaling system to create a biological coherence that, for instance, an animal body possesses.
- Nevertheless, the informational connections do exist that bind individual humans together and it is not trivial.
- Indeed, this is exactly what has catapulted our species into modernity where our cumulative cultural evolution (CCE) has defined the concurrent successes and failures of our species. Modernity's meaning / meta / polycrisis and progress traps are a direct result of CCE.
- Humanity's intentions and its consequences, both intended and unintended are what has come to shape the entire trajectory of the biosphere. So the impacts of human CCE are not trivial at all. Indeed, a paper has been written proposing that human information systems could be the next Major System Transition (MST) that could lead to another future MET that melds biotic and abiotic
- This circles back to Adam's question and what has just emerged for me is this question:
- Is it possible that we could evolve in some kind of hybrid direction where we are biologically still separate individuals BUT deeply intertwingled informationally through CCE and something like the theoretical Indyweb/Indranet which is an explicit articulation of our theoretical informational connectivity?
- In other words, could "collective consciousness be explicitly defined in terms of an explicit, externalized information system reflecting intertwingled individual/collective learning?
- The Indyweb / Indranet informational laminin protein / connective tissue that informationally binds individuals to others in an explicit, externalized means of connecting the individual informational nodes of the social superorganism, giving it "collective consciousness" (whereas prior to Indyweb / Indranet, this informational laminin/connective tissue was not systematically developed so all informational connection, for example of the existing internet, is incomplete and adhoc)
- The major trajectory paths that global or localized cultural populations take can become an indication of the behavior of collective consciousness.
- Voting, both formal and informal is an expression of consensus leading to consensual behavior and the consensual behavior could be a reflection of Homni's collective consciousness
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insight
- While socially annotating this video, a few insights occurred after last night's sleep:
- Hypothes.is lacks timebound sequence granularity. Indyweb / Indranet has this feature built in and we need it for social annotation. Why? All the information within this particular annotation cannot be machine sorted into a time series. As the social annotator, I actually have to point out which information came first, second, etc. This entire comment, for instance was written AFTER the original very short annotation. Extra tags were updated to reflect the large comment.
- I gained a new realization of the relationship and intertwingularity of individual / collective learning while writing and reflecting on this social annotation. I think it's because of Adam's question that really revolves around MET of Individuality and the 3 conversant's questioning of the fluid and fuzzy boundary between "self" and "other"
- Namely, within Indyweb / Indranet there are two learning pillars that make up the entirety of external sensemaking:
- the first is social annotation of the work of others
- the second is our own synthesis of what we learned from others (ie. our social annotations)
- It is the integration of these two pillars that is the sum of our sensemaking parts. Social annotations allow us to sample the edge of the sensemaking work of others. After all, when we ingest one specific information source of others, it is only one of possibly many. Social annotations reflect how our whole interacts with their part. However, we may then integrate that peripheral information of the other more deeply into our own sensemaking work, and that's where we must have our own central synthesizing Indyweb / Indranet space to do that work.
- It is this interplay between different poles that constitute CCE and symmathesy, mutual learning.
- adjacency between
- Indyweb / Indranet name space
- Indranet
- automatic vs manual references / citations
- adjacency statement
- Oh man, it's so painful to have to insert all these references and citations when Indranet is designed to do all this! A valuable new meme just emerged to express this:
- Pain between the existing present situation and the imagined future of the same si the fuel that drives innovation.
- Oh man, it's so painful to have to insert all these references and citations when Indranet is designed to do all this! A valuable new meme just emerged to express this:
- Namely, within Indyweb / Indranet there are two learning pillars that make up the entirety of external sensemaking:
- While socially annotating this video, a few insights occurred after last night's sleep:
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quote: Gien
- Pain between an existing present situation and an imagined, improved future is the fuel that drives innovation.
- date: 2023, Nov 8
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Tags
- Deep Humanity
- DH
- individual/collective gestalt
- CCE
- Indyweb
- comparison - social superorganism - multicellular organism
- Indranet
- meta crisis
- Homni
- Indyweb / Indranet
- polycrisis
- Gyuri Lajos
- major evolutionary transition
- intertwingled sensemaking
- quote - innovation
- social superorganism
- quote - Gien
- cumulative cultural evolution
- meaning crisis
- symmathesy
Annotators
URL
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- Oct 2023
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the quick definition would be 00:03:20 something like the metac crisis is all the crisis put together right and people go oh oh I see I see but they don't see right cuz it's not really the end of it that's just the beginning of the conversation the metac crisis is also in 00:03:33 the way you make sense of the world the way you feel it in in imote in relation to it the metac crisis is in your incapacity to fully articulate and narrate the self in this 00:03:47 context and The Meta crisis is also a you know coextensive with Co arising with this particular historical Epoch
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for: metacrisis framework, progress trap - metacrisis sensemaking
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comment
- progress trap framing would help provide an overarching sensemaking framework
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- Sep 2023
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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I don't know why I can't do Evergreen and Atomic Notes.. .t3_16r8k0b._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; }
reply to u/SouthernEremite at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/16r8k0b/i_dont_know_why_i_cant_do_evergreen_and_atomic/
If you're not using your notes to create or write material and only using them as a form of sensemaking, then perhaps you don't need to put as much work or effort into the permanent notes portion of the work? Ask yourself: "Why are you taking notes? What purpose do they serve?" Is the form and level you're making them in serving those purposes? If not, work toward practicing to make those two align so that your notes are serving an actual purpose for you. Anything beyond this is make-work and you could spend your time more profitably somewhere else.
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- May 2023
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maggieappleton.com maggieappleton.com
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And lastly, we can push ourselves to do higher quality writing, research, and critical thinking. At the moment models still can't do sophisticated long-form writing full of legitimate citations and original insights.
Is this not merely entering an 'arms race' against our own tools? With the rat race effect of higher demands over time?
What about moving sideways not up? Bringing in the richness of the layering of our (internal) reality and lives? The entire fabric that makes up our lives, work, communities, societies, indicately more richly in our artefacts. Which is where my sense of beauty is [[Schoonheidsbegrip 20151023132920]] as [[Making sense is deeply emotional 20181217130024]]
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- Jan 2023
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Tobeuseful,thenotestakenatmedicallecturesshouldbeasummaryonly;noattempt shouldbemadetotakeaverbatimreport
Verbatim notes are not the goal.
The idea of note taking as a means of sensemaking and understanding is underlined in an 1892 article in a shorthand magazine whose general purpose was to encourage shorthand and increasing one's writing speed, often to create verbatim records:
To be useful, the notes taken at medical lectures should be a summary only; no attempt should be made to take a verbatim report.
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- Jul 2022
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www.zylstra.org www.zylstra.org
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At the same time, like Harold, I’ve realised that it is important to do things, to keep blogging and writing in this space. Not because of its sheer brilliance, but because most of it will be crap, and brilliance will only occur once in a while. You need to produce lots of stuff to increase the likelihood of hitting on something worthwile. Of course that very much feeds the imposter cycle, but it’s the only way. Getting back into a more intensive blogging habit 18 months ago, has helped me explore more and better. Because most of what I blog here isn’t very meaningful, but needs to be gotten out of the way, or helps build towards, scaffolding towards something with more meaning.
Many people treat their blogging practice as an experimental thought space. They try out new ideas, explore a small space, attempt to come to understanding, connect new ideas to their existing ideas.
Ton Zylstra coins/uses the phrase "metablogging" to think about his blogging practice as an evolving thought space.
How can we better distill down these sorts of longer ideas and use them to create more collisions between ideas to create new an innovative ideas? What forms might this take?
The personal zettelkasten is a more concentrated form of this and blogging is certainly within the space as are the somewhat more nascent digital gardens. What would some intermediary "idea crucible" between these forms look like in public that has a simple but compelling interface. How much storytelling and contextualization is needed or not needed to make such points?
Is there a better space for progressive summarization here so that an idea can be more fully laid out and explored? Then once the actual structure is built, the scaffolding can be pulled down and only the idea remains.
Reminiscences of scaffolding can be helpful for creating context.
Consider the pyramids of Giza and the need to reverse engineer how they were built. Once the scaffolding has been taken down and history forgets the methods, it's not always obvious what the original context for objects were, how they were made, what they were used for. Progressive summarization may potentially fall prey to these effects as well.
How might we create a "contextual medium" which is more permanently attached to ideas or objects to help prevent context collapse?
How would this be applied in reverse to better understand sites like Stonehenge or the hundreds of other stone circles, wood circles, and standing stones we see throughout history.
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- Jun 2022
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxfTVdohSwA
Christine Moskell talks about a professor's final exam design prompting students to go back to annotations and add new commentary (or links to other related knowledge) that they've gained during the length of a course.
Link to:
This is very similar to the sort of sensemaking and interlinking of information that Sönke Ahrens outlines in his book How to Take Smart Notes though his broader note taking thesis goes a few additional steps for more broadly synthesizing ideas into longer papers, articles, theses, and books.
Dr. Moskell also outlined a similar tactic at the [[Hypothesis Social Learning Summit - Spotlight on Social Reading & Social Annotation]] earlier today, though that video may not be accessible for a bit.
Cross reference: https://web.hypothes.is/event/social-learning-summit-spotlight-on-social-reading-social-annotation/
How can we better center and model these educational practices in our pedagogies?
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- Dec 2020
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jon.bo jon.bo
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I’m not always connected to a stable internet connection
The centralized nature of today's systems is a problem for several reasons - Some are technical, but this applies socially and economically as well. This mindset of centralization is arguably a cultural afterimage from the advent of computing, with little incentive on the part of business to change.
In each of these senses (technical, social, economic) many of the computational abstractions we use today to simplify individual progress actually hold us back in aggregate.
In my view, there exist eery parallels between the technical foibles of centralization (CAP, etc), and the subtle manner of economic and behavioral coercion which come along for the ride. I do not believe there is a magic bullet to be found per se – but rather that it is possible to decentralize well, both from a technical perspective, and in terms of business as a function of value-addition rather than coercion.
Tags
Annotators
URL
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- Jun 2020
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debrouwere.org debrouwere.org
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If people search through your website, will you guide them to topics first, or will they get a list of individual stories and updates to stories? Does your front page even hint at the fact that people can get more than just the daily news at your site?
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If you eventually do manage to find the information you need, kudos. You’re obviously very committed to learn more. But wasn’t the whole “we need context” meme prompted by the acknowledgement that most readers get confused and quit way before that stage?
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web.archive.org web.archive.org
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For the longest time, whenever I read the news, I’ve often felt the depressing sensation of lacking the background I need to understand the stories that seem truly important. Day after day would bring front pages with headlines trumpeting new developments out of city hall, and day after day I’d fruitlessly comb through the stories for an explanation of their relevance, history or import. Nut grafs seemed to provide only enough information for me to realize the story was out of my depth.
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podcastnotes.org podcastnotes.org
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Just as journalists should be able to write about anything they want, comedians should be able to do the same and tell jokes about anything they please
where's the line though? every output generates a feedback loop with the hivemind, turning into input to ourselves with our cracking, overwhelmed, filters
it's unrealistic to wish everyone to see jokes are jokes, to rely on journalists to generate unbiased facts, and politicians as self serving leeches, err that's my bias speaking
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- Dec 2019
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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War on Sensemaking II, Daniel Schmachtenberger
Any idea can be weaponized.
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- Jul 2019
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www.loper-os.org www.loper-os.org
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The Lisp Machine (which could just as easily have been, say, a Smalltalk machine) was a computing environment with a coherent, logical design, where the “turtles go all the way down.” An environment which enabled stopping, examining the state of, editing, and resuming a running program, including the kernel. An environment which could actually be fully understood by an experienced developer. One where nearly all source code was not only available but usefully so, at all times, in real time. An environment to which we owe so many of the innovations we take for granted. It is easy for us now to say that such power could not have existed, or is unnecessary. Yet our favorite digital toys (and who knows what other artifacts of civilization) only exist because it was once possible to buy a computer designed specifically for exploring complex ideas. Certainly no such beast exists today – but that is not what saddens me most. Rather, it is the fact that so few are aware that anything has been lost.
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Annotators
URL
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- Jan 2019
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wendynorris.com wendynorris.comTitle13
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Zack [42] distinguished these four termsaccording to two dimensions: the nature of what is being processed and the consti-tution of the processing problem.The nature of what is being processed is either information or frames of ref-erence. With information, we mean “observations that have been cognitively pro-cessed and punctuated into coherent messages” [42]. Frames of reference [4, p.108], on the other hand, are the interpretative frames which provide the context forcreating and understanding information. There can be situations in which there is alack of information or a frame of reference, or too much information or too manyframes of reference to process.
Description of information processing challenges and breakdowns.
Uncertainty -- not enough information
Complexity -- too much information
Ambiguity -- lack of clear meaning
Equivocality -- multiple meanings
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Ta b l e 3DERMIS design premises [29]
Muhren and Walle use the 6 of the 9 most relevant design premises for the future information system design guidelines for DERMIS, another crisis management system
Information focus (dealing with complexity)
Crisis memory (creating historical frames of reference)
Exceptions as norms (support changing frames of reference in fluid, unpredictable scenario)
Scope and nature of crisis (support adaptable management depending on type of crisis)
Information validity and timeliness (synergy of coping with uncertainty and creating frames of reference from relevant, known information)
Free exchange of information (synergy of social context and creating useful/sharable frames of reference)
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For our research design, we drew on Walsham [33] and Klein and Myers [13],who provide comprehensive guidelines on how to conduct interpretive case studyresearch in the IS domain.
Bookmarked as a reminder to get these papers which could be helpful for the participatory design study.
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The problems of managing information and managing frames of reference are“tightly linked in a mutually interacting loop” and require “managing informationand the systems that provide it” [42]. IS have been generally designed to overcomethe information problems from Table 1. Most IS are aimed at either storing and re-trieving information to reduce uncertainty, such as database management systemsand document repositories, or at analyzing and processing large amounts of infor-mation to reduce complexity, such as decision support systems [31]. However, aswe have previously discussed, information related strategies are not always helpfulin coping with a variety of potential meanings.Problems of interpretation and the creation and management of frames of refer-ence, which aids Sensemaking, have generally not been taken into account whendesigning IS. Most IS currently seem tointend the opposite because they aim atreplacing or suppressing the possibility tomake sense of situations.
Description of problem in integrating sensemaking (interpretive information process) into structured data systems.
information =/= data
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there is scarce research on how IS can support informa-tion processing challenges—specifically related to Sensemaking—in crisis manage-ment [14]
Muhren and Walle also state that there are "few studies that use Sensemaking as an analytical lens for the design of information technology."
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Sensemaking is about contextual rationality, built out of vaguequestions, muddy answers, and negotiated agreements that attempt to reduce ambi-guity and equivocality. The genesis of Sensemaking is a lack of fit between whatwe expect and what we encounter [40]. With Sensemaking, one does not look at thequestion of “which course of action should we choose?”, but instead at an earlierpoint in time where users are unsure whether there is even a decision to be made,with questions such as “what is going on here, and should I even be asking this ques-tion just now?” [40]. This shows that Sensemaking is used to overcome situationsof ambiguity. When there are too many interpretations of an event, people engagein Sensemaking too, to reduce equivocality.
Definition of sensemaking and how the process interacts with ambiguity and equivocality in framing information.
"Sensemaking is about coping with information processing challenges of ambiguity and equivocality by dealing with frames of reference."
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Decision making is traditionally viewed as a sequential process of problem classifi-cation and definition, alternative generation, alternative evaluation, and selection ofthe best course of action [26]. This process is about strategic rationality, aimed atreducing uncertainty [6, 36]. Uncertainty can be reduced through objective analysisbecause it consists of clear questions for which answers exist [5, 40]. Complex-ity can also be reduced by objective analysis, as it requires restricting or reducingfactual information and associated linkages [42]
Definition of decision making and how this process interacts with uncertainty and complexity in information.
"Decision making is about coping with information processing challenges of uncertainty and complexity by dealing with information"
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The central problem requiring Sensemaking ismostly that there are too many potential meanings, and so acquiring informationcan sometimes help but often is not needed. Instead, triangulating information [34],socializing and exchanging different points of view [20], and thinking back of pre-vious experiences to place the current situation into context, as the retrospectionproperty showed us, are a few strategies that are likely to be more successful forSensemaking.
Strategies for sensemaking
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Just as the information processing challenges from Table 1 are not mutually ex-clusive, Sensemaking and decision making cannot be separated, but instead operatesimultaneously. Meaning must be established and then sufficiently negotiated priorto acting on information [42]: Sensemaking shapes events into decisions, and deci-sion making clarifies what is happening [40].
Interaction between sensemaking and decision making
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Weick et al. [41, p. 419] formulate a gripping conclusion on what the sevenSensemaking properties are all about: “Taken together these properties suggest thatincreased skill at Sensemaking should occur when people are socialized to makedo, be resilient, treat constraints as self-imposed, strive for plausibility, keep show-ing up, use retrospect to get a sense of direction, and articulate descriptions thatenergize. These are micro-level actions. They are small actions. But they are smallactions with large consequences.”
Description of how the seven properties interact to foster sensemaking.
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The seven different properties of Sensemaking can be captured by the acronym SIRCOPE: Social context, Identity construction, Retrospection, Cue extraction, Ongo-ing projects, Plausibility, and Enactment [17–21, 37–39]
"Weick distinguishes between seven properties of Sensemaking"
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Crisis environments are characterized by various types of information problemsthat complicate the response, such as inaccurate, late, superficial, irrelevant, unreli-able, and conflicting information [30, 32]. This poses difficulties for actors to makesense of what is going on and to take appropriate action. Such issues of informationprocessing are a major challenge for the field of crisis management, both concep-tually and empirically [19].
Description of information problems in crisis environments.
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We use the theory of Sensemaking to study exactly this: how people makesense of their environment, and how they give meaning to what is happening. Sense-making is a crucial process in crises, as the manner and thereby the success of howone deals with crucial events is determined by the grasp one has of a situation.
Sensemaking frame used in this study relies on work by Weick, et al.
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wendynorris.com wendynorris.com
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hese characteristics require thatemergent response groups adopt specific approaches forknowledge coordination. One such approach commonlydocumented in studies of such groups is their use ofa learn-by-doing (versus decision making) action-basedmodel of coordinated problem solving, in which sensemaking and improvisation are the norm rather than theexception
Evokes LPP, sensemaking, and improvised coordination.
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wendynorris.com wendynorris.com
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Recently, Brown and Duguid (2001, p. 208) sug-gested that coordination of organizational knowledgeis likely to be more challenging than coordination ofroutine work, principally because the “elements to becoordinated are not just individuals but communitiesand the practices they foster.” As we found in ourinvestigation of coordination at the boundary, signif-icant epistemic differences exist and must be recog-nized. As the dialogic practices enacted in responseto problematic trajectories show, the epistemic dif-ferences reflect different perspectives or prioritiesand cannot be bridged through better knowledge
Need to think more about how subgroups in SBTF (Core Team/Coords, GIS, locals/diaspora, experienced vols, new vols, etc.) act as communities of practice. How does this influence sensemaking, epistemic decisions, synchronization, contention, negotiation around boundaries, etc.?
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wendynorris.com wendynorris.com
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Finally, the notation of the disaster phases affected emergency-responders' decisions. The lexicon of the four phases appeared to force disaster managers and responders to think and respond in a linear, separate-category fashion. Thus, this paradigm in the end can hurt effective response
Need to research whether these issues have been resolved or workarounds put in place since this 1997 publication. I kind of suspect not.
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Emergency response and recovery is not a linear process; decisions that are made during the emergency phase will impact the recovery process. In practice, however, recovery often takes place in an ad hoc fashion because key decisions are not part of a strategic program to restore services and rebuild communities. (Dumam et al. 1993, p. 30)
This practitioner critique gets at the importance of better understanding temporal sensemaking and enactment during disasters since decisions can influence across the different phases
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Stoddard argues that the use of time-and-space models in disaster research
Complete quote runs over 2 pages: "Stoddard argues that the use of time-and-space models in disaster research provides an important methodological disaster research tool. Most important, he contends that the different phases of disaster represent different types of individual and group behavior."
Stoddard's definition offers a solid framework to begin the conversation about how and why it's important to understand the interaction between pluritemporal modes of time and humanitarian response (individual and group sensemaking and enactment).
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wendynorris.com wendynorris.com
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It is boundaries that help us separate one entity from another: "To classify things is to arrange them in groups ... separated by clearly determined lines of demarcation .... At the bottom of our conception of class there is the idea of a circumscription with fixed and definite outlines. "7 Indeed, the word define derives from the Latin word for boundary, which is finis. To define something is to mark its boundaries, 8 to surround it with a mental fence that separates it from everything else. As evidenced by our failure to notice objects that are not clearly differentiated from their surroundings, it is their boundaries that allow us to perceive "things" at all.
Social reality is constructed by defining boundaries and visibility to objects. Evokes Bowker and Star's classification and boundary object framework.
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es an entity with a distinctive meaning5 as well as with a distinctive identity that sets it apart from everything else. The way we cut up the world clearly affects the way we organ
Zerubavel posits that meaning is made by distinguishing objects/events from one another. These contrasts are further delineated by classification and/or making things invisible.
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Temporal differentiation often entails an experience of discontinuity among different sorts of reality as well.
This sense of discontinuity is problematic in determining situational awareness during crisis/emergency information work when it's not always evident what is live, what is recorded, and what is algorithmically delayed.
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Temporal differentiation helps substantiate elusive mental distinctions. Like their spatial counterparts, temporal boundaries often represent mental partitions and thus serve to divide more than just time.
Temporal boundaries (and the objects inherent in them) are used to convey additional meaning and context. These partitions are used to describe historical distinctions ("The Great Depression", "Vietnam Era"), life distinctions (work vs private time vs religious observance).
Examples above are from the chapter.
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In order to endow the things we perceive with meaning, we normally ignore their uniqueness and regard them as typical members of a particular class of objects (a relative, a present), acts (an apology, a crime), or events (a game, a conference).2 After all, "If each of the many things in the world were taken as distinct, unique, a thing in itself unrelated to any other thing, perception of the world would disintegrate into complete meaninglessness. "3 Indeed, things become meaningful only when placed in some category.
Connect this to Bowker and Star (2000) Sorting Things Out.
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The perception of supposedly insular chunks of space is probably the most fundamental manifestation of how we divide reality into islands of meaning. Examining how we partition space, therefore, is an ideal way to start exploring how we partition our social world
Zerubavel describes how we use space to partition meaning from large, complex or unfamiliar objects.
Evokes the notion of a boundary object.
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Cooperative work is not facilitated simply by the provision of a shared database, butrequires the active construction by the participants of a common information spacewhere the meanings of the shared objects are debated and resolved, at least locallyand temporarily. Objects must thus be interpreted and assigned meaning, meaningsthat are achieved by specific actors on specific occasions of use. Computer supportfor this aspect of cooperative work raises a host of interesting and difficult issues.
Pretty much a nutshell of the SBTF time study challenges.
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In this section of the paper we broach two aspects of this articulation issue, onefocusing on the management of workflow, the other on the construction and manage-ment of what we term a ‘common information space’. The former concept has beenthe subject of discussion for some time, in the guise of such terms as office automa-tion and more recently, workflow automation. The latter concept has, in our view,been somewhat neglected, despite its critical importance for the accomplishmentof many distributed work activities
A quick scan of ACM library papers that tag "articulation work" seems to indicate the "common information space" problem still has not attracted a lot of study. This could be a good entry point for my work with CSCW because time cuts across both workflow and information space.
Nicely bundles boundary infrastructure, sense-making and distributed work
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- Sep 2018
- Aug 2018
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Plotline 3: Making life sensible is as much about who we are as about narrating events and experiences
Later in this section, Cunliffe and Coupland write:
"In summary, ‘making life sensible’ is a complex interweaving of self-other, of retrospective and prospective, discursive and embodied, routine and creative, explicit and intuitive sensemaking."
The narrating process is a "a complex interweaving of self-other, of retrospective and prospective, discursive and embodied, routine and creative, explicit and intuitive sensemaking."
Identity construction (who am I?, who are you?, who do I want to be in the future?) is an important factor here as the foundation by which socially constructed sensemaking is generated and justifications (narrative rationality) are staked out.
It's also incredibly messy, social, and contradictory -- all simultaneously.
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Plotline 2: Making our life sensible enough to go on is an embodied process
The embodied process involves how we our bodies (everything except cognitive function) to make sense of our surroundings/situations. This embodied process includes emotions, physical self, language, gestures, actions, and lived experiences.
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Plotline 1: Making life sensible occurs in polyphonic, responsive and ongoing moments of embodied narrative performance
Polyphonic is described as multiple voices and multiple interpretations of the story element which, in turn, can produce competing narratives. There is also a subtle temporal nature to "making life sensible" as people attempt to apply narrative logic in the moment, to use retrospection to make sense of past events or to peer into the future.
Uses a more emotional, experiential, and embodied perspective for sensemaking through narrative is counter to the org studies POV that sensemaking is frequently a "deliberate, collaborative and unemotional process"
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Indeed, we use the term ‘sensible’ deliberately to differentiate our approach from more cognitive schematic approaches to sensemaking. The Latin root of sensible is sensibilis, to do with the senses – being sensitive to and showing good sense in practical living circumstances.
The authors differentiate between sensemaking in the cognitive sense and sensible in the experiential sense.
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We offer an alternative to sensemaking as a representational, cognitive, information-processing, or communicative process, and contest the idea that sensemaking is a purely retrospective and linear activity. We build on narrative theory to propose that sensemaking is a temporal process of making our life and ourselves sensible through embedded and embodied narrative performances. It is an interpretive process in which we judge our expe-rience, actions and sense of identity in relationship to specific and generalized others.
Cunliffe and Coupland's framework that contests Weick's perspective on sensemaking and proposes a new interpretative process that is temporal, embodied and performative.
See: Goffman (1978) The presentation of self in everyday life
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Narrative rationality is therefore fundamental to narrative sensemaking, because it connect us with our social surroundings through an ongoing process of interpreting, assessing and critiquing our experience: a form of ‘criti-cal self-awareness’ (Fisher, 1985: 349)
While there are different theories to describe how narratives are constructed in organizations, Cunliffe and Coupland argue that "... narratives are the means by which we organize and make sense of our experience and evaluate our actions and intentions."
Narrative rationality takes sensemaking a step further and theorizes how people judge the merits of a narrative from discordant story elements.
Cunliffe and Coupland mention that people use probability, fidelity, plausibility, reliability, trustworthiness and wisdom of the constructed narrative and the narrator as ways to judge its rationality.
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Although Weick sees interpretation as a key element in creating such stories, he defines it as ‘the process by which managers translate data into knowledge and understanding about the environment’ (2001: 251), i.e. a cognitive infor-mation-processing activity. Our article offers an alternative perspective by focusing on the interpretive and embodied nature of sensemaking within the flow of experience.
Contrast of Weick's view of storytelling as cognitive vs Cunliffe and Coupland's perspective as experiential.
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More specifically it is the process by which we label, categorize and create plausible stories that retrospectively ‘rationalize what peo-ple are doing’ (Weick et al., 2005)
Shorter Weick sensemaking description
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Weick’s formative work is based on the claim that sensemaking is the means by which we enact (make ‘real’) our environments: a process of social construction and committed interpretation that ‘introduces stability into an equivocal flow of events by means of justi-fications that increase social order’ (2001: 15).
Cunliffe and Coupland's interpretation of Weick's sensemaking theory
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Our theorization of embodied sensemaking differs from, and extends, current work in three main ways. First, we define embodiment more broadly than emotion – as bodily sensations, felt experiences, emotions and sen-sory knowing; second, we situate embodiment in lived experience not as abstracted from, and able to be generalized across, experience; and third, we argue that embodiment is an integral part of sensemaking.
Description of embodied narrative sensemaking. Cunliffe and Coupland refer to these as plotlines:
• "Plotline 1: Making life sensible occurs in polyphonic, responsive and ongoing moments of embodied narrative performance"
• "Plotline 2: Making our life sensible enough to go on is an embodied process"
• "Plotline 3: Making life sensible is as much about who we are as about narrating events and experiences"
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Ricoeur (e.g. 1988) because he sees narrative theory as a form of making sense in and across time that involves personal and community identit
Ricoeur claims there are temporal elements to sensemaking
Get this paper
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Merleau-Ponty (2004 [1962], 2004 [1948]) because of his theorization of the relationship between perception and embodi-ment.
Unsure about whether Merleau-Ponty's work also includes a temporal element. Get the paper.
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Specifically, we argue that making life sensible:• occurs in embedded narrative performances – in the lived experience of everyday, ordinary interactions and conversations with others and ourselves;• is temporal, taking place moment-to-moment within and across time and space;• encompasses polyphony as we attempt to interweave multiple, alternative and contested narratives and stories;• is an ongoing embodied process of interpretation of self and experience in which we cannot separate ourselves, our senses, our body and emotions
Four features of everyday sensemaking:
• lived experience
• temporal
• polyphonic
• embodied
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Our contribution lies in extending the work on sensemaking theory to include the notion of embodied narrative sensemaking, which posits that whether we are aware of it or not, we make our lives and ourselves ‘sensible’ through embodied (bodily) interpreta-tions in our ongoing everyday interactions.
Extension of sensemaking theory
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A gap therefore exists in terms of theorizing sensemaking as a lived embodied everyday experience
Cunliffe and Coupland claim a research gap
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They are concerned with organization theory, with explanations that ‘separate processes of organizing from the sites where they take place’ (Czarniawska, 2010: 156). To talk about abduction as cue + frame + connection, or about improvisation as variation + selection + retention, or about recurrent action patterns (Cohen, 2009) as routines, or about dominant frames of reference, is to reach for a more sweeping grasp of social order.
Czarniawska's observation that "separate processes of organizing from the sites where they take place" could be a helpful frame for talking about the digital humanitarian/social coordination work process that sits outside of the social media platforms where the data is derived.
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Humphreys, Ucbasaran and Lockett attend to recurring stories told by jazz musicians, with the joint lenses of sensemaking and sensegiving, for purposes of articulating the order that makes improvisation possible.
How is sensegiving defined here?
Does the social coordination process involve both sensemaking and sensegiving?
Does the social media UGC and collection process involve both sensemaking and sensegiving?
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As a final comment to follow-up on the template for linking that Cunliffe and Coupland provide, while they keep three processes in motion, it is unlikely that all three stabilize at the same time. It is plausible that the first of the three to stabilize then acts as a frame within which the other two unfold. Thus, while there may be a dominant story that shapes organizing and sensemaking, there may be dominant sensemaking or dominant organizing that constrain the other two. It is all a matter of sequences of stabilization.
Temporal influence on the sequence of organizing, storytelling and sensemaking.
What comes first, as Weick argues it is unlikely each dimension stabilizes (becomes clear) simultaneously?
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The haunting question is how do I fit into the story.
Need to read the football club paper to understand this context but is it referring to situating oneself in the story?
Read the Nâslund and Pemer paper to see how they are using the term "semantic fit".
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A cue, by itself, with-out a frame, has no predicate. Once you put it in a frame, it does. A further linkage is that the emphasis in abduction on supposition ties it to antenarrative conceived as a bet or speculation akin to a presumption of logic that needs to be worked out.
Weick argues that sensemaking is ultimately an iterative inductive "process of connecting cues to interpretations back to cues ..."
Connecting a cue to frame through abduction is a linking process that helps to knit together the 7 aspects of sensemaking.
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The difference between contested and uncontested polyphony may link to antenarratives. Boje (2001: 2) argues that when people translate stories into narratives they ‘impose counterfeit coherence and order on otherwise fragments and multi-layered experiences of desire.’ Counterfeit coherence is unstable, subject to detection and breaching, all of which link the degree of contestation to sensemaking, organizing, and transitions between stories and narratives
Weick writes before this passage:
"When Cunliffe and Coupland incorporate polyphony into their first plotline, they make it more meaningful to examine contested stories."
Need to read the paper to get a better sense of how they're defining contested -- but if it references a situation where the antenarrative information is confusing, complex, contradictory then this concept will be a good fit for the SBTF study.
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Cunliffe and Coupland call attention to polyphony. That one word is rich in connota-tions for them. It suggests contestation, making meaning with others, the overlap of sensemaking and sensegiving, and the emotionality of sensemaking
Cunliffe and Coupland's definition of polyphony.
This is important for framing the crowdsourcing and social media aspects of DHN work and the complexity of the sensemaking process.
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Sense and organizing emerge when a story begins to come together, identities begin to make sense, identities and actions can be given a sense of narrative rationality and we can connect plot and character. (p. 81)This is my favorite one sentence effort to provide a template for further development of linkages. The sentence is noteworthy because it includes sense, organizing, story, identities, actions, making sense, giving sense, narrative rationality, plot, and character. All of these elements are portrayed in the context of beginnings and emergings, which conveys a sense of ongoing forming and dissolving
Weick's preferred description of sensemaking by Cunliffe and Coupland.
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Maclean et al. point to an intriguing tension in sensemaking. The tension is generated by the question, is sensemaking episodic or continuous?
A quasi-temporal aspect of sensemaking. Good to know but I don't think at this point that it is a factor for the current study.
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In the lan-guage of Heidegger, sensemaking is triggered when the availableness of ready-to-hand coping is interrupted and attention shifts to unready-to-hand occurentness. The inter-rupted project still provides a frame and restoration occurs within that frame. An impor-tant linkage resides in the fact that environments vary significantly in the frequency of unexpected events.
Weick continues the point that certain environments have so many interruptions and anomalies that the sensemaking process feels continuous even though it is really a series of distinct episodes of sensemaking through multiple breaches and restorations.
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Jeong and Brower (2008: 225) propose that practitioner sensemaking develops through the three stages of noticing, interpretation, and action, which vary as a function of the ecological, institutional, and social relational contexts in which they are constructed.
Jeong and Brower's definition of sensemaking
Seems to be more of an extension of Dewey's framework on attention.
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Starbuck and Milliken (1988) assert that ‘sensemaking refers to “comprehending, understanding, explaining, attributing, extrapolating and predicting.”
Starbuck and Milliken's defintion of sensemaking
This is quite broad.
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Maclean et al. also demonstrate clearly how sensemaking can be defined by its stages. The movement through time of different forms of interpretive work is captured in their phrase ‘language that constructs and gives order to reality, which it (temporarily) sta-bilizes’ (p. 20). They suggest that this movement consists of locating, meaning-making, and becoming.
Maclean et al's definition of sensemaking
The idea of temporal stages and spatial movement that includes locating could also be a way to describe the situating behavior.
So far, this is the only definition that seems to include a temporal-spatial component
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Later in their article, Cunliffe and Coupland effectively summarize sensemaking as embodied efforts to figure out what to do and who we are. That is a tidy framework for interpreting the life stories of elite bankers since they are essentially figuring out what they did and who they were, with heavy editing, to point up the legitimacy of the what and who that are retrieved.
Another Cunliffe and Coupland definition of sensemaking
Could "embodied efforts to figure out what to do and who we are" touch on what I'm calling situated time? Need to read the paper to see how they refer to the term embodied.
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Gephart et al. define sensemaking as ‘an ongoing process that creates an intersubjective sense of shared meanings through conversation and non-verbal behavior in face to face settings where people seek to/produce, negotiate, and maintain a shared sense of meaning’ (2010: 284–285).
Gephart's definition of sensemaking
Could "shared meaning" be driving the need for SBTF volunteers to situate themselves in time in order to co-construct a story?
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Cunliffe and Coupland treat sensemaking as ‘collaborative activity used to create, legitimate and sustain organiza-tional practices or leadership roles’ (p. 65). If we add the phrase ‘and individual’ to the word ‘collaborative’ in that definition then we have a rendition of sensemaking that works for the Maclean et al. article, right down to the focus on legitimacy and leadership.
Cunliffe and Coupland's definition of sensemaking
This seems less relevant to the SBTF volunteers' situating behavior.
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Whittle and Mueller also anticipate and inform the nature of reconstructing a life story when they depict sensemaking as ‘a broader term [than stories] that refers to the process through which people interpret themselves and the world around them through the pro-duction of meaning’ (p. 114). It is their focus on ‘meaning’ and their inclusion of both the person and ‘the world around them’ that fits Maclean
Whittle and Mueller's definition of sensemaking
Could "process through which people interpret themselves and the world around them through the production of meaning" be driving the need for SBTF volunteers to situate themselves in time in order to co-construct a story?
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To talk about antenarrative as a bet is also to invoke an important structure in sense-making; namely, the presumption of logic (Meyer, 1956)
the presumption of logic manifests in the 7th aspect of sensemaking: plausibility?
identity construction / retrospection / enactment / social construction / ongoing / extracted cues / plausibility
"Antenarratives set up a similar dynamic. The transition from story to narrative is fostered by the belief that the fragments will have made sense although at the moment that is little more than a promise." <-- that is the logic, that at some points the disparate facts will come together and make sense/
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People are often thrown into pre-existing, organized action patterns. They experience the middle of a narrative but only the vaguest beginnings or ends. Without those boundaries people dwell in antenarrative. But that is where sense-making, organizing, and discursive devices make a difference. ‘People who are thrown establish their own temporality’ (Hernes and Maitlis, 2010: 31)
This is the sociotemporal hook for the SBTF study.
Read the Hernes and Maitlis paper
"People who are thrown establish their own temporality" << what does this mean?
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‘Antenarrative is the fragmented, non-linear, incoherent, collective, unplotted and pre-narrative speculation, a bet’ (Boje, 2001: 1). Organizing, in the context of antenarrative, is a bet that these fragments will have become orderly and that efforts to impose temporality
This is the sociotemporal hook for the SBTF study.
Antenarrative definition from Boje (2001).
See: Dawson and Sykes (2018) https://via.hypothes.is/http://wendynorris.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Dawson-and-Sykes-2018-Concepts-of-Time-and-Temporality-in-the-Storytelling-and-Sensemaking-Literatures-A-Review-and-Critique.pdf
This runs counter to the more frequent linear time structure of narratives.
The wikipedia article makes a bit more sense:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antenarrative
"Antenarratives serve a similar purpose. The process of moving from the nebulous and chaotic story to a narrative with a beginning middle and end is the antenarrative faith that story fragments will make retrospective sense some time in the future."
More info on antenarrative here:
"The antenarrative is pre-narrative, a bet that a fragmented polyphonic story will make retrospective, narrative, sense in the future. In a recent description of the bet aspect of antenarrative Karl Weick has said "To talk about antenarrative as a bet is also to invoke an important structure in sense-making; namely, the presumption of logic (Meyer, 1956)."
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Whittle and Mueller describe how, in crises, people are ‘called upon to justify or excuse their own role (or lack thereof)’ (p. 133) using story-lines built from discursive devices. Justifications are crucial anchors in organizing as they bind people to actions that are consistent with them. And such actions tend to recur, stabilize, and serve as resources for dominant stories.
Description of how storytelling is generated during crisis and how it connects to enactments that is a part of sensemaking.
Read this paper.
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Justification, understood as discourse that introduces legitimacy and stability into social action, is a source of linkage that recurs in several articles. Cunliffe and Coupland, for example, argue that we create sense ‘if we can find justifications (narrative rationality) for our and others’ actions’ (p. 69)
Justification definition.
Justification is used as a linkage in storytelling to connect the what/with/for elements.
See: Cunliffe and Coupland http://wendynorris.com/cunliffe-and-coupland-2011-from-hero-to-villain-to-hero-making-experience-sensible-through-embodied-narrative-sensemaking/
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Brown’s (2004) summary description of dominant stories: a hegemonic story may be able to fix the meaning of the concepts and labels available to narrate events in the organization, and thereby circumscribe sensemaking
Dominant story definition.
Described the way some stories persist because they link/associate the what/with/for concepts that makes sense. The dominant story is not the only way to link these attention concepts (see Dewey) but they become normalized due to people's need/desire to satisfice.
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When I say ‘see more clearly’ I have in mind John Dewey’s (1902) threefold question for examining attention. Dewey argues that we need to examine to what attention is being paid, with what, and for what.
Weick argues here that Dewey's approach to "examining attention" is needed to "see more clearly":
"to what" >> attention is paid
"for what" >> purpose of the attention
"with what" >> method for paying attention
Weick appears to use this approach to focus on the links needed to compile a story into sensemaking
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sensemaking
Sensemaking is an approach to thinking about and implementing communication research and practice and the design of communication-based systems and activities. It consists of a set of philosophical assumptions, substantive propositions, methodological framings and methods.
According to Weick, sensemaking consists of seven aspects:
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cdn.inst-fs-iad-prod.inscloudgate.net cdn.inst-fs-iad-prod.inscloudgate.net
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The term ‘enactment’ is used to preserve the central point that when people act, they bring events and structures into existence and set them in motion. People who act in organizations often produce structures, constraints, and opportunities that were not there before they took action.
Enactment definition.
Enactment is both a process and a product.
Additional explanation here: https://www.utwente.nl/en/bms/communication-theories/sorted-by-cluster/Organizational%20Communication/enactment_theory/
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The way to counteract catastrophes, therefore, is to reduce tight coupling and interactive complexity. To do this, it seems important not to blame technology, but rather to look for and exag- gerate all possible human contributions to crises in the hope that we can spot some previously unnoticed contributions where we can exert leverage.
The primary process- and design implication suggested by enactment is to increase the ways to leverage human action and sensemaking during crises.
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Perhaps the most important implication of enactment is that it might serve as the basis for an ideology of crisis prevention and management. By ideology, we mean a ‘relatively coherent set of beliefs that bind people together and explain their worlds in terms of cause-and-effect relations’ (Beyer, 1981, p. 166).
Definition of ideology of crisis prevention and management. This concept gets at how beliefs influence enactment -- as both a process and product.
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Not only does action simplify tasks, it also often slows down the effects of one variable on another.
Action helps to clarify the crisis through narrowing/focusing cause/effect and interactions. Again, Weick notes a temporal dimension (speed) of actions but doesn't explore it explicitly.
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Enactment affects crisis management through several means such as the psychology of control, effects of action on stress levels, speed of interactions, and ideology
First mention of temporality as "speed of interactions"
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As people see more, they are more likely to notice things they can do something about, which confirms the perception of control and also reduces crisis intensity to lower levels by virtue of early intervention in its development
"Information is Aid" also contributes to the idea that enactment can assert a sense of control.
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As forcefulness and ambiguity increase, enactment is more con- sequential, and more of the unfolding crisis is under the direct control of human action. Conversely, as action becomes more tentative and situations become more clearly structured, enactment processes will play a smaller role in crisis development and managment. Enactment, therefore, will have most effect on those portions of a crisis which are loosely coupled.
Again, another argument for "Information is Aid" as a way to clarify the known situation, provide more complete descriptions of potential action, etc., this ultimately helps to decrease ambiguity.
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These possibili- ties are more likely to be seen if we think of large crises as the outcome of smaller scale enactments. When the enactment perspective is applied to crisis situations, several aspects stand out that are normally overlooked. To look for enactment themes in crises, for example, is to listen for verbs of enactment, words like manual control, intervene, cope, probe, alter, design, solve, decouple, try, peek and poke (Perrow, 1984, p. 333), talk, disregard, and improvise. These verbs may signify actions that have the potential to construct or limit later stages in an unfolding crisis
Curious why temporality is never mentioned as a dynamic of enactment. It's somewhat implied in the idea of acting in the moment or responding after the fact, but sensemaking and social construction is inherently temporal.
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The assumptions that top management make about components within the firm often influence enactment in a manner similar to the mechanism of self-hlfdling prophecy. Many of these assumptions can increase or decrease the likelihood that small errors will escalate into major crises. Thus, assumptions are an important source of crisis prevention.
Beyond the top management examples provided here, could expectations that DHN work is untrustworthy or inaccurate escalate crisis response due to incomplete situational awareness or an assumption it must be produced in a certain way?
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Capacity can also affect crisis potential through staffing decisions that affect the diversity of acts that are available. Enactment is labour-intensive, which means understaffing has serious effects.
Diverse labor force is also a central principle of effective crowdsourcing and collective intelligence.
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Capacity and response repertoire affect crisis perception, because people see those events they feel they have the capacity to do something about. As capacities change, so too do perceptions and actions. This relationship is one of the crucial leverage points to improve crisis management.
This gets at the idea of information as a form of humanitarian aid.
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Action in the form of capacity can affect crisis management through perception, distribution of competence and control within a hierarchy, and number and diversity of actors.
Capacity seems to have an actor/agency quality to it.
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When action is irrevocable, public and volitional, the search for explanations becomes less casual because more is at stake. Explanations that are developed retrospec- tively to justify committed actions are often stronger than beliefs developed under other, less involving, conditions. A tenacious justification can produce selective attention, confident action, and self-confirmation. Tenacious justifications prefigure both perception and action, which means they are often self-confirming.
Enactment becomes visible when retrosepctive sensemaking about the crisis event incorporates commitment/justification for previous actions.
Commitment is a double-edged sword: It can help construct useful sensemaking or can perpetuate inaccurate assumptions.
Is there a form of satisficing happening here?
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From the standpoint of enactment, initial responses do more than set the tone; they determine the trajectory of the crisis. Since people know what they have done only after they do it, people and their actions rapidly become part of the crisis. That is unavoidable. To become part of the problem means that people enact some of the environment they face. Had they not acted or had they acted differently, they would face a different set of problems, opportunities and constraints.
crisis trajectory signals a temporal aspect to the event (Reddy's timeline dimension) and to a person's enactment (Reddy's horizon dimension).
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Thus, an enacted environment has both a public and a private face. Publicly, it is a construction that is usually visible to observers other than the actor. Privately, it is a map of if-then assertions in which actions are related to out- comes. These assertions serve as expectations about what will happen in the future.
How does the process of social coordination influence the actions, interpretations, and predictions that are enacted from the map?
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At the heart of enactment is the idea that cognition lies in the path of the action. Action precedes cognition and focuses cognition. The sensemaking sequence implied in the phrase, ‘How can I know what I think until I see what I say?’ involves the action of talking, which lays down traces that are examined, so that cognitions can be inferred. These inferred cognitions then become pre- conceptions which partially affect the next episode of talk, which means the next set of traces deposited by talk are affected partially by previous labels and partially by current context. These earlier inferences also affect how the next episode of talk is examined and what is seen.
Related to the preceding annotation, how does the social coordination process influence enactment?
Are the volunteers "talking out loud" on Slack as a means of sensemaking to themselves or with others?
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An enacted environment is the residuum of changes produced by enactment. The word ‘residuum’ is preferred to the word ‘residue’ because residuum emphasizes that what is left after a process cannot be ignored or left out of account because it has potential significance (Webster‘s Dictionary of Synonyms, 1951, p. 694). The product of enactment is not an accident, an afterthought, or a byproduct. Instead, it is an orderly, material, social construction that is subject to multiple interpreta- tions. Enacted environments contain real objects such as reactors, pipes and valves. The existence of these objects is not questioned, but their significance, meaning, and content is. These objects are inconsequential until they are acted upon and then incorporated retrospectively into events, situations, and explanations.
Enactment as an environment.
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Enactment is the social process by which a ‘material and symbolic record of action’ (Smircich and Stubbart, 1985, p. 726) is laid down. The process occurs in two steps. First, portions of the field of experience are bracketed and singled out for closer attention on the basis of preconceptions. Second, people act within the context of these bracketed elements, under the guidance of preconceptions, and often shape these elements in the direction of preconceptions (Powers, 1973). Thus, action tends to confirm preconceptions.
Enactment as a process.
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Diverse as HROs may seem, we lump them together because they all operate in an unforgiving social and political environment, an environment rich with the potential for error, where the scale of consequences precludes learning through experimentation, and where to avoid failures in the face of shifting sources of vulnerability, complex processes are used to manage complex technology (Rochlin, 1993).
High Reliability Organization (HRO) definition.
Examples offered are: nuclear power plants, air traffic control systems, and space shuttles
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We will argue that HROs are important because they provide a window on a distinctive set of pro-cesses that foster effectiveness under trying conditions.The processes found in the best HROs provide the cognitive infrastructure that enables simultaneous adaptive learning and reliable performance.
What are some concrete examples of"cognitive infrastructure", "simultaneous adaptive learning" and "reliable performance"?
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We then move to the heart of the analysis and argue that organizing for high reliability in the more effective HROs, is characterized by a preoccupation with failure, reluctance to simplify interpretations, sensitivity to operations, commitment to resilience, and underspecifi ed structuring. These processes reduce the inertial blind spots that allow failures to cumulate and produce catastrophic outcomes.
Answers some questions from previous annotation but still need some concrete examples.
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wendynorris.com wendynorris.com
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Sixth, investi-gating the use of temporal modalities in making andgiving sense in the storytelling of management andother occupational groups, for example, in processesof story-weaving in the assembly of smaller storiesthat variously draw from the past, present and future(see Maitlis 2005, p. 45; Reissner and Pagan 2013,pp. 52, 83)
Future research direction: ??
Look at the citations
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Fifth, the importance of shifting contextualconditions over chronological time in the rewritingof histories and the reconstruction of narratives thatreposition individuals and groups, in, for example,a movement from hero to villain (see Cunliffe andCoupland 2012; Godfreyet al. 2016).
Future research direction: ??
Read the Cunliffe and Coupland paper
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Fourth, the com-pression and expansion of time structures in storiesthat compete, and the different techniques for draw-ing on temporal modalities for sensemaking in theconstruction of compelling power-political narrativesthat seek to influence the sense giving of others (seeBuchanan and Dawson 2007; Dawson and Buchanan2012)
Future research direction: Timescapes // Time compression // Post-Colonial and Feminist Time
See: Adam 1990 and 2004 See: Giddens' structuration theory
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Third, the use of time and temporality for mak-ing and giving sense to unfinalized stories, antenar-ratives and future scenarios (see Boje 2011), includ-ing attention to issues, such as temporal depth, timeurgency and temporal orientation in promoting theneed for short or long-term strategies (see Jabri 2016,p. 97; Kunischet al. 2017, p. 1043)
Future research direction: Temporal depth // Tempo
See: Bluedorn 2002
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Second, howtime is variously used in past constructions that givesense to what has occurred, in for example, nostal-gic tales that seek to sustain identity-relevant valuesand beliefs, or using time to leverage reformulationsin repositioning these tales, for example, with theaim of undermining nostalgia as a platform for resis-tance (see Brown and Humphreys 2002; Strangleman1999).
Future research direction: Importance of reflexivity // Effects of Time Perspectives on sensemaking
See: Zimbardo & Boyd's Time Perspectives
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First, exam-ination of time representations in the more finalizedand structured stories in organizations (see Gabriel2000): for example, how time and temporality areused to convey a particular message, moral lesson orpresent a causal explanation that is both compellingand plausible.
Future research direction: Language of time
See: Zerubavel and semiotics
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Our discussion commences with a fourfold charac-terization of underlying temporal modalities fromwhich we extend six pathways in mapping out fu-ture research opportunities.
1) "finalized retrospective stories’ that seek to reconstruct from the past, key events, characters and plots that provide causal explanations for making sense of current disruptions and ambiguities (these stories take on the Aristotelean convention of being characterized by a beginning, middle and end)"
2) "‘unfinalized prospective stories’ that are forward looking: time is no longer set, but non-linear and indeterminate. These stories of the future are unfinalized (like Boje’s concept of antenarrative), subjective and open to re-storying in seeking to make sense of ongoing and newly emerging occurrences as well as the uncertainties, threats and opportunities of a future that has yet to be."
3) "‘present continuity-based stories’ that attempt to provide some reassurances about sustaining relations and values: to reassert a collective sense of belonging, sense of stability and membership, as in the heightened sense of belongingness through nostalgia (Strangleman 1999) that enables a sense of continuity between what is happening, what happened in the past and what may happen in the future."
4) "‘present change-based stories’ often comprising a mixture of optimism in promoting the benefits of changing for the future, and pessimism in constructing stories on the potential threats and negative implications of future change (aligning with Ybema’s (2004) notion of postalgia)."
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Boudes and Laroche (2009) attend to narra-tive sensemaking in post-crisis inquiry reports inanalysing the foreseeability of the deaths that oc-curred following the heat wave in France in 2003.They identify a tendency towards simplification andreductionism, but suggest that, rather than represent-ing a linear temporal sequence in which recommen-dations follow explanation, ‘the story is built at leastpartially around preferred lessons and the desiredrecommendations for action’ (Boudes and Laroche2009, p. 392).
Read this paper.
The paper focuses on post-crisis sensemaking. Do they discuss sensemaking in the moment?
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This returns us to Weick’s (2012) claimthat the unfinalized uncertainties of life experiences ismade sense of and temporally fixed in narrative ratio-nality, but with the added notion that these temporalconstructions build on prospective ideas (a non-lineartemporality in story construction, but not in the struc-ture of the final narrative).
This seems to fit with the Cunliffe and Coupland paper that in the moment actions are non-linear but the narrative is plotted across time (linear).
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As the authors note: ‘Sensemaking is tempo-ral in at least two ways: in the moment of performancewe draw on past experiences, present interactions andfuture anticipations, and second, we plot narrative co-herence across time’ (Cunliffe and Coupland 2012,p. 83).
This is a helpful frame for thinking about how SBTF volunteers are simultaneously trying to evaluate granular bits of information and add it to a larger emerging story about the event.
This paper also cites Goffman's Presentation of Self
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However, in their study focusing on theimportance of time to sensemaking in crisis situa-tions, Combe and Carrington (2015) point out thatmost studies still remain focused on objective clocktime with little attempt to examine the influence ofthe subjective experience of the past or how leadersimagine the future may affect how they interpret andmake sense of the present
studies of time and sensemaking in a crisis.
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Al-though both scholars usefully illustrate the powerof narratives to make and give sense to experiencesin organizations, Gabriel (2000) adopts a folkloristposition with a reliance on conventional temporal-ity and sequenced event time, in which causality isbuilt into the narrative construction with a progres-sive temporality (beginning, middle and end). In con-trast, Boje (2011) is interested in the more fragmentedand terse stories and the ways in which these un-resolved narratives open up possibilities for poten-tial futures (prospective sensemaking).
Contrast of Gabriel and Boje's approaches in a nutshell.
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As Bojeet al. (2016a, p. 395)indicate, through situating antenarratives in subjec-tive time, they are able to show ‘how diverse voicesinterconnect, embed and entangle in organizationalstrategies’.
Need to unpack this a bit. Is this how to scaffold the SBTF situated time instances into a sensemaking process?
Subjective time (per the philosopher's term) is referred to as socially-constructed time (by the sociologists).
In Brunelle (2017):
*"temporal construals
The way organizational members interpret or situate themselves in time and embrace time-related concepts such as of time scarcity, urgency, orientation. ‘temporal construals inform and are informed by intersubjective, subjective and objective times.’ (R. A. Roe et al., 2009)"*
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Boje seeks to elevate the place ofstories in organization studies in examining the inter-play between the control of narrative (order) and theunfinalized nature of emergent story (disorder)
How does this manifest (if at all) in crisis social media?
What is represented by the order? What is represented by the disorder?
If crisis social media is performative storytelling, then what does Goffman say about sensemaking?
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For Gabriel, stories are a subset of narratives (whileall stories are narratives, not all narratives are stories),arguing that theories, statistics, reports or documentsthat describe events and seek to present objective factsshould not be treated as stories (nor for that mattershould clich ́es), as stories interpret events often dis-torting, omitting and embellishing to engage audienceemotions, they generate, sustain, destroy and under-mine meaning, and while they are crafted along par-ticular lines they do not obliterate the facts (Gabriel2000, pp. 3–4).
Story definition per Gabriel.
SBTF data collection/sensemaking would not be a story, per Gabriel's definition.
But is it sensemaking?
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This dominant linear view of temporality drawnfrom conventional representations of clock time (dig-itally embedded in a range of everyday devices) hasbeen widely criticized (Adam 1990, 2004; Glennieand Thrift 1996; Thrift 2004; Wajcman 2015), witha growing recognition of the need to bring differen-tiated concepts of time to the fore (see Christens-sonet al. 2014). There is a small but expandingcall to move beyond objective time (Allmanet al.2014) and time-free research (Hassard 1990b, p. 1)or timeless knowledge (Roeet al. 2009) to a moreconceptually informed theorization in which conceptsof time are made more explicit and openly discussed(Anconaet al. 2001b; Bluedorn 2002; Dawson andSykes 2016; Goodmanet al. 2001).
Cites the need for more concrete examples and more direct engagement with time in theory.
See: Bluedorn 2002 See: Nowotny
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This review highlights how conventional explanations in these related fields of studyare underpinned by linear conceptions of temporality (with an associated causality)and how there is growing recognition of fluidity in the way pasts and futures cometogether in temporal sensemaking of an emergent present.
how is "emergent present" defined? Is there a predictive element based on past experience and future expectations?
Is "emergent present" a near-future but not quite real-time dimension of time?
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ClassicAristotelian narratives with a linear time structure (stories with a beginning, middle andend) are prominent in the storytelling literature, whereas retrospection, in drawing onthe past in making sense of the present, is a temporal modality central to foundationalconcepts of sensemaking. In examining time and temporality in these related fields,the authors show how the conventional temporal sequence of a past, present and futuredominates, with little consideration being given to time as a multiple rather than singularconcept
Is the process of retrospection present as a multitemporal or pluritemporal dimension in SBTF crowdwork that is attempting to build knowledge (situational awareness)?
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wendynorris.com wendynorris.com
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A promising approach that addresses some worker output issues examines the way that workers do their work rather than the output itself, using machine learning and/or visualization to predict the quality of a worker’s output from their behavior [119,120]
This process improvement idea has some interesting design implications for improving temporal qualities of SBTF data: • How is the volunteer thinking about time? • Where does temporality enter into the data collection workflow? • What metadata do they rely on? • What is their temporal sensemaking approach?
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wendynorris.com wendynorris.com
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But time is a complex and a sensitive topic in reason to the different vantage points; and its meaning often tends to be taken for granted and given commonsense or self-evident attributions (Sahay, 1997).
Read this paper.
Sahay, S. (1997). Implementation of information technology: a time-space perspective. Organization Studies, 18, 229–260
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wendynorris.com wendynorris.com
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In order to endow the things we perceive with meaning, we normally ignore their uniqueness and regard them as typical mem-bers of a particular class of objects (a relative, a present), acts (an apology, a crime), or events (a game, a conference).
Connect this to HCC reading: Bowker and Star (2000) Sorting Things Out.
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wendynorris.com wendynorris.com
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The tension between action theory (or the theory of structuration) and sys-tems theory has not completely vanished, but at least the areas of dis-agreement have become clearer. The 'event' structure of time with its implicit legitimization through physics, but which is equally a central notion for historians (Grossin, 1989) holds a certain attraction for empiri-cal studies and for those who are interested in the definitional
Nowotny revisits Elias' idea about the relationship between time and events as a framework that is multidisciplinary, complex, integral to sensemaking, and appeals to empirical research.
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wendynorris.com wendynorris.com
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Some have described rumoring as a task of collective problem solving (Bordia and DiFonzo, 2004; Shibutani,1966) withreasonably well defined start and end points. A process helping individuals make sense of their environments and cope withuncertainty, rumoring tends to dissipate once cognitive unclarity has been eliminated (Caplow, 1947).
By this definition, digital humanitarian work would be described as rumoring. This seems really problematic.
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wendynorris.com wendynorris.com
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“Since one cannot distinguish a figure without a background, the present does not meaningfully exist without a past” (emphasis added; 2001, p. 608). As the background, the past provides a benchmark for the present against which comparisons can be made. And such comparisons indicate whether the present is the same as the past or different from it.
Relationship between present and past for sensemaking and meaning.
Later Bluedorn notes that interpretation and understanding of the past can be applied to a similar present. If they are different, then "the past provides a context, a frame for the present, and the linkages with the past provide an explanation for the present by suggesting how the present came to be, which makes the present more understandable, more meaningful."
The question then becomes which past -- how long ago (its temporal depth) is compared to the present (or future) for sensemaking.
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So connections and the meaning they generate are fundaThe Best of Times and the Worst of Timesmental, which is why the loss of meaning is so troubling—the systematic loss of meaning even more so.
Fundamental temporality of connections definition.
How two factors -- speed/tempo and temporal depth of an experience generate meaning.
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Put succinctly, these principles indicate that the definition of the situation guides human behavior, and according to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, language is a necessary prerequisite for defining any situation (see Chapter 1). Language provides the elements from which meaning is constructed—the names of things and their qualities and the manner in which they may be related—and the definition of the situation combines these elements to construct sense-making explanations of events, definitions of the situation.
Sensemaking is linked to language. If an event/thing cannot be defined then it can't be acted upon, discerned or generate motives.
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Lewin’s famous final clause, “there is nothing so practical as a good theory,” means that understanding (theory) can guide useful action (the practical), so theory (understanding) can be empowering. A lack of meaning and understanding of events also makes it very hard to know what one should do (norm- lessness or anomie), because it is nearly impossible to know what to do in a situation if one cannot comprehend it.
One example of meaning/alienation is a lack of understanding which interrupts sensemaking and creates a sense of friction in how to react/behave.
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“the dynamic weaving of events, interactions, situations, and phases that comprise those relationships” (2000, p. 27), the dynamic weaving of events, interactions, and situations being very similar to narrative.
Temporal context definition.
Furthers the notion of narrative and how relationships between events/things is transformed into a cohesive whole which is necessary for sensemaking.
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A narrative consists of three essential elements: past events, story elements, and a temporal ordering (Maines 1993, p. 21).
Narrative definition.
Developing the plot around the story elements is the most important element for sensemaking. It transforms a chronology/sequence of events into something more meaningful, more memorable,and more relatable.
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wendynorris.com wendynorris.com
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And if Weick has drawn the correct conclusion about how the past is used to enact the present, being able to note the differences may be even more important than being able to see the similarities. This is especially so in equivocal enactments, which Weick (1979, p. 201) described as involving a figure-ground construction, one in which the ground consists of the strange and unfamiliar
Weick describes the need to discern differences over similarities to effectively use past-present metaphors as a sense-making device.
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Among the reasons this may be so is that the simple future tense is more open-ended than the future perfect tense, the latter seeming to convey a sense of closure and a focus on specific events, which is unlike the simple future tense in which anything is possible (Weick 1979, pp. 198-99). It is well to note that although Weick did not explicitly frame his argument in terms of metaphor, it is really another example of the past-as-metaphor-for- the-future idea developed in this chapter, albeit a more precise manifestation of it. The precision comes in Weick’s conclusion that some futures are more like the past, are more similar to it than others. In his argument, the future described in future perfect terms is more similar to the past than the future described in simple future terms.
future perfect tense appears to generate a sense of focus and closure while simple future tense is more open-ended.
Weick theorizes that future perfect tense casts the description of a future event in more detail.
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To consider the future, it may help to treat it like the past, that is, as ifit had already happened. This is the premise Weick proposed in his discussion of future perfect thinking (1979, pp. 195-200). Future perfect thinking is a grammatical prescription instructing managers and planners and all who consider the future to do so in the future perfect tense. Thus rather than the simple future tense as used in a statement like “We shall overcome,” the future perfect128Eternal Horizonstense would have us say, “We shall have overcome.” Alfred Schutz believed that the “planned act bears the temporal character of pastness' (Schutzs emphasis), because the actor projects the act as completed and in the past, a paradox that places the act in both the past and the future at the same time, something the future perfect tense makes possible (1967, p. 61). These were insights that Weick both noted (1979, p. 198) and built upon to explain why future perfect thinking may make it easier to envision possible futures.
Interesting proposal to use future perfect tense to envision the future.
is that happening to an extent with the multiple uses/tenses of "update" in the SBTF transcripts?
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Weick argued that the past was used to understand the present and the future, that neither could be understood without the past. And how the past can provide this understanding, this meaning, is a major insight
Weick connects sensemaking in present and future constructs to retrospection of the past.
See also: Fraisse (1963, p. 172) and Schutz (1967, p. 51)
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- Jul 2018
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wendynorris.com wendynorris.com
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A concept in Anthony Giddens’s structuration theory explains how patterns like these are maintained with such regularity and precision. The concept is “duality of structure,” by which Giddens meant that “the structured properties of social systems are simultaneously the medium and outcome of social acts(Giddens’s emphasis; 1995, p· 19)·
Sensemaking wrt time can be explained through structuration theory. Cites Giddens' quoted definition.
Duality of structure applies to temporality when people follow rules/set patterns that in turn convey new socially constructed meanings.
I'm a little uncertain about this. Look at the Structuration Theory cheat sheet in Mendeley
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Thus for meaning (significance) to be attributed to events, behaviors, and objects, to things in general, they must be seen in their relationships with other things. They can have no meaning as isolated phenomena.
Time generates meaning through comparison and relationships with other things.
For linear time, relationships between past, present and future provide for and universally communicate socially constructed meaning.
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Less explicit and less emphasized in the literature is time’s role in the creation of meaning. Malinowski and Adam hint at this capability in their statements: “sentimental necessity,” “orientation,” and “symbol for the conceptual organisation of natural and social events,” the last of the three phrases most directly indicating time’s role in generating meaning. So both capabilities increase with the development of greater temporal expertise.
Homonid development: time as a tool for sensemaking.
Cites Adam (1990)
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wendynorris.com wendynorris.com
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The overload of information, for example, is becoming so extensive that taking advantage of only the tiniest fraction of it not only blows apart the principle of instantaneity and 'real-time' communication, but also slows down operators to a pomt where they lose themselves in the eternity of electronically networked information.
High tempo Information overload exacerbates time compression and thus impacts temporal sensemaking through typical means via chronologies, linear information processing, and past/present/future contexts.
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- Nov 2017
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wrapping.marthaburtis.net wrapping.marthaburtis.net
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If the Web were a concrete space, what would it look like?
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I’ve come to realize more and more that these analogies, metaphors, and symbols are the way that we can come to teach the Web so that our students know it in the sense of recognizing it — distinguishing it, perceiving it in relation to those things already known.
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- Dec 2015
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rhizome.org rhizome.org
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"I do not believe that knowledge is embedded in documents, just as beauty is not embedded in objects. Beauty and knowledge are created by joining and creating complex relationships between creators, viewers, contexts, histories, etc."
Very meta here, but this SO applies to public annotation, #amirite?
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