How Analysts Think: Sense-making Strategies in the Analysis of Temporal Evolution and Criminal Network Structures and Activities

Abstract

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Sense-making strategies in explorative intelligence analysis of network evolutions

“…find a node or identify a path between two nodes). For our study, we developed fairly complex and explorative tasks with intelligence analysts (Doppler Haider et al 2017). One of the tasks, for example, requires the participants to identify groups of co-offenders whose criminal activity increases over time.…”

“…Sedig et al (2016) studied complementary interactionsthat is, interactions that occur in conjunction with each other to improve the users' performance. Doppler Haider et al (2017) used the Data/Frame model to analyse users' interaction log data. The goal of studying interaction processes is to clarify how users make sense of the information provided by visualisations.…”

“…Current systems do not support this kind of network analysis. To identify and extract a priority-ranked list of networks we defined a prioritisation strategy and evaluated a prototype with domain experts (Doppler Haider et al 2017;Seidler et al 2016). Force priorities, for example, can imply that certain crime types get an increased weight compared to other crime types (e.g.…”

“…This work is based on a pilot study with experts that showed acceptance and usefulness of a weighted network calculation of co-offenders, which is visualised using two techniques (Seidler et al 2016). In a first step, we analysed the results of the user study in a qualitative approach using the emergent themes analysis (Doppler Haider et al 2017). In this work we extend the analysis by a systematic quantitative and qualitative content analysis of the thinking aloud protocols.…”

“…We conducted a qualitative content analysis (Schreier 2012) of the participants' verbal reports during seven explorative tasks. We used the codes from the previous analysis (Doppler Haider et al 2017) as a starting point. The codes are partly based on Klein's Triple Path Modela top-down approach (Klein 2013) and partly on codes resulting from previous research in a bottom-up approach (Doppler Haider et al 2017).…”