ForSense: Accelerating Online Research Through Sensemaking Integration and Machine Research Support

Abstract

Online research is a frequent and important activity people perform on the Internet, yet current support for this task is basic, fragmented and not well integrated into web browser experiences. Guided by sensemaking theory, we present ForSense, a browser extension for accelerating people's online research experience. The two primary sources of novelty of ForSense are the integration of multiple stages of online research and providing machine assistance to the user by leveraging recent advances in neural-driven machine reading. We use ForSense as a design probe to explore (1) the benefits of integrating multiple stages of online research, (2) the opportunities to accelerate online research using current advances in machine reading, and (3) the opportunities to support online research tasks under the presence of imprecise machine suggestions. In our study, we observe people performing online research tasks, and see that they benefit from ForSense's integration and machine support for online research. From our study, we derive and share key recommendations for designing and supporting imprecise machine assistance for research tasks. CCS CONCEPTS• Human-centered computing → Interactive systems and tools; Empirical studies in interaction design; • Information systems → Web searching and information discovery.

Crystalline: Lowering the Cost for Developers to Collect and Organize Information for Decision Making

“…Similar to what was reported in prior work [99], since our participants were not explicitly told how the system worked to automatically collect and rank information, they had to form their own mental models and hypotheses about how the system works and how they could affect it with their behavior. For example, P8 noticed that "it looks like if I spend a little bit more time on a particular place on a page, the corresponding criterion would get picked up and bumped up quickly; and if I click on that part a bunch of times, which happens to be what I typically would do when I try to focus my attention on something now that I'm thinking about it, it's [the corresponding criterion] going to go up even faster."…”

“…Similar to previous systems [61,81,99], the sidebar can be toggled in and out like a drawer by clicking the extension icon (Figure 1h) or using a keyboard shortcut. Developers can passively monitor the sidebar as they are searching and browsing to make sure the system performs correctly, and quickly correct or dismiss the mistakes that the system makes.…”

The Influence of Visual Provenance Representations on Strategies in a Collaborative Hand-off Data Analysis Scenario

“…In their work, they explain how something is introduced can have a direct impact on how users frame and continue their analysis. Intelligence analysis [9,18], medical diagnosis [23,39], and even humble internet research [41,42,49] all share tasks where complex data requires thoughtful consideration and artifact synthesis to arrive at and present a formal conclusion [58]. So, while common analytic settings clearly employ parts of the sensemaking process, they also define operations involving collaborative teaming or hierarchical units [37].…”

“…Without the transcription of accurate mental schemes, details can be forgotten, leading to false conclusions and inaccuracies [51,52]. By partnering with computers, human analysts can focus less on annotation tasks, like recording how they arrived at different concepts, and shift their attention toward directing the analysis and hypothesizing relationships between discovered ideas [11,19,49]. In this study, we examine how the representation of a user's process impacts the sensemaking processes of new analysts.…”

Threddy: An Interactive System for Personalized Thread-based Exploration and Organization of Scientific Literature

“…CiteSense [68] developed an information-rich environment which provides various features for searching, appraising, and managing the different tasks involved in a literature review. While prior work in supporting scholarly literature review primarily focused on a standalone information environment detached from users' flow of reading, recent notable exceptions in online sensemaking support tools are ForSense [50] and Fuse [38].…”