Understanding and Supporting Collaborative Sensemaking in Collaborative Information Seeking.
Abstract
With the ubiquity of current information retrieval systems, users move beyond individual searching
to performing complex and exploratory information seeking tasks together with collaborators
for social, leisure or professional purposes. As a consequence, collaborative information seeking
(CIS) systems become popular to support users for CIS tasks. These CIS systems aimed at enhancing
the awareness of each others activities between collaborators but provide little support
for collaborative sensemaking of the CIS task and related information together. To design tools
for collaborative sensemaking, we lack an understanding of how users perform collaborative
sensemaking and what support they need for collaborative sensemaking in CIS. Therefore, the
aim of this thesis is to understand user strategies for collaborative sensemaking and the challenges
they face in collaborative sensemaking, and to design tools to support collaborative sensemaking
in CIS.
In this thesis, we first present an exploratory study that investigates how users perform collaborative
sensemaking, and the challenges they encountered in CIS. A follow-up study then
compared the collaborative sensemaking behaviour and challenges users encountered between
different CIS tasks. Through a comparative analysis, we acquired an understanding of the difference
of collaborative sensemaking behaviour according to task as well as the general patterns
in collaborative sensemaking behaviour and the challenges that users face. Based on the findings
from our user studies, we proposed and designed a tool MakeSenseTogether, with novel
topic-related features, to support collaborative sensemaking behaviour. An evaluation study of
MakeSenseTogether shows that the topic-related features improved user experience of collaborative
sensemaking in CIS.
This thesis contributes to our understanding of collaborative sensemaking in CIS in two ways.
Firstly, we gain a comprehensive understanding of the general process of collaborative sensemaking
and the challenges users face. Secondly, we proposed novel topic-related features which can
improve users experience in collaborative sensemaking.
Authors
TAO, YihanCollections
- Theses [4504]