How Analysts Think (?): Early Observations

Wong, B. L. William

doi:10.1109/jisic.2014.59

Cited by 13 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…Wong [38] describes the work of intelligence analysts as sense-making processes. It should be pointed out that intelligence analysts often work with visualizations (e.g., node-link diagrams to show relationships between offenders).…”

Section: Sense-making and Insight Generationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sense-making Strategies for the Interpretation of Visualizations—Bridging the Gap between Theory and Empirical Research

Pohl

Haider

2017

MTI

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Making sense of visualizations is often an open and explorative process. This process is still not very well understood. On the one hand, it is an open question which theoretical models are appropriate for the explanation of these activities. Heuristics and theories of everyday thinking probably describe this process better than more formal models. On the other hand, there are only few detailed investigations of interaction processes with information visualizations. We will try to relate approaches describing the usage of heuristics and everyday thinking with existing empirical studies describing sense-making of visualizations.

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Section: Sense-making and Insight Generationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sense-making Strategies for the Interpretation of Visualizations—Bridging the Gap between Theory and Empirical Research

Pohl

Haider

2017

MTI

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“…In this section we briefly describe our proposition of how analysts think [26]. This proposition is based on a set of focus group studies with 20 analysts, cognitive task analysis studies using think aloud protocols with 6 analysts, and another 6 librarians working on intelligence analysis type tasks.…”

Section: A How Analysts Thinkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Supporting the Externalisation of Thinking in Criminal Intelligence Analysis

Passmore

Attfield

Kodagoda

et al. 2015

2015 European Intelligence and Security Informatics Conference

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Abstract-At the end of the criminal intelligence analysis process there are relatively well established and understood approaches to explicit externalisation and representation of thought that include theories of argumentation, narrative and hybrid approaches that include both of these. However the focus of this paper is on the little understood area of how to support users in the process of arriving at such representations from an initial starting point where little is given. The work is based on theoretical considerations and some initial studies with end users. In focusing on process we discuss the requirements of fluidity and rigor and how to gain traction in investigations, the processes of thinking involved including abductive, deductive and inductive reasoning, how users may use thematic sorting in early stages of investigation and how tactile reasoning may be used to externalize and facilitate reasoning in a productive way. In the conclusion section we discuss the issues raised in this work and directions for future work.Keywords-externalisation of thinking; argument; narrative; thematic sorting; criminal intelligence I.CONTEXT VALCRI (Visual AnaLytics for sensemaking in Criminal Intelligence Analysis) is a large scale integrating project funded by the European Community under the FP7 Security Programme. The project spans forty-four months with a budget of ~€13M and the consortium comprises seventeen partners from the EU and one from the US. The project aims to create an advanced visual analytics reasoning and sensemaking system to support criminal intelligence analysis. This involves the development and integration of state-of-the-art technology that will include sophisticated user interfaces for techniques such as spatio-temporal analysis and semi-automated semantic knowledge extraction. The project will develop an analyst user interface that allows direct manipulation of information objects in an intuitive way, coupled with a reasoning workspace that allows analysts to exploit data in large data sets. The reasoning workspace is broken down into a data space that allows the analyst to see and understand the data they have, an analysis space that provides direct manipulation functions to act on the data, and a hypothesis space to provide an area to develop and assemble chains of evidence into narratives and arguments. Thus central to the VALCRI system is the need to represent and externalise the analyst's thinking, from initial stages where there is little information available and the way forward unclear, to the final stages of investigations where there may be much clearer understanding of emerging narrative and supporting argument. In this paper we begin by considering the state-of-the-art in the representation of 'well-formed' criminal investigations, by which we mean investigations in their later stages, and then consider the issue of supporting investigators in moving towards these. II. SUPPORT FOR THE LATER STAGES OF ANALYTIC REASONINGIn this section we consider literature related to evidential s...

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“…In Figure 1, we show the fluidity and rigour model that was proposed in Wong (2014). We posited that in addition to the processes of sense-making such as described by the Data-Frame model, analysts reason through a problem or a situation making inferences abductively, inductively or deductively.…”

Section: Sense-making and Inference Makingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…How do analysts think? In an earlier paper (Wong, 2014) we postulated that at the start of an investigation when data is sparse analysts engage in creative, generative, tentative and playful sense-making. They use a combination of storytelling and inference making techniques to assemble the data they discover into explanations (Lombrozo, 2012).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How Analysts Think

Wong

Kodagoda

2015

Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual

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In this paper we present early observations of how seven criminal intelligence analysts think and how the make inferences. We used the Critical Decision Method to identify the causal mechanisms of how they think and reason, i.e. how they organize, structure and assemble their information, understandings and inferences. We envisaged that this would enable us to design software to support the structuring of arguments and the evidential reasoning process. Our early observations suggest that analytic reasoning is not straight-forward, but appears chaotic and haphazard, and sometimes cyclic; and that inference making – abduction, induction and deduction – are not independent processes, but are closely intertwined. These processes interact dynamically, each producing outcomes that become anchors used by the others.

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How Analysts Think (?): Early Observations

Cited by 13 publications

References 11 publications

Sense-making Strategies for the Interpretation of Visualizations—Bridging the Gap between Theory and Empirical Research

Sense-making Strategies for the Interpretation of Visualizations—Bridging the Gap between Theory and Empirical Research

Supporting the Externalisation of Thinking in Criminal Intelligence Analysis

How Analysts Think

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