(2011-07-10) Shum Sensemaking Suite

Simon Buckingham Shum discusses his suite of Sense Making tools: Compendium, CoHere, and others. This work is the core of the Hypermedia Discourse research programme, investigating the reading, writing and contesting of ideas as hypermedia networks grounded in discourse schemes. We are striving for cognitively and computationally tractable conceptual structures: fluid enough to serve as augmentations to group working memory, yet structured enough to support long term memory. Such networks can be (i) mapped by multiple analysts to visualize and interrogate the claims and arguments in a literature, and (ii) mapped in real time to manage a team’s information sources, competing interpretations, arguments and decisions, particularly in time- pressured scenarios where harnessing Collective Intelligence is a priority. Given the current geo-political and environmental context, the growth in distributed Team Work, and the need for multidisciplinary approaches to Wicked problems, there has never been a greater need for sensemaking tools to help diverse Stakeholders build common ground (Coalition). [Abstract from HyperMedia Discourse (Dialogue): Contesting Networks of Ideas and Arguments]

Compendium... is optimised for use in what is arguably the most demanding context of deployment for a knowledge representation tool: real time collaborative modelling.

CoHere moves the work with Compendium into the Web 2.0/3.0 (Social Software) sphere, supporting collaborative Mind Mapping, Social Bookmarking, direct web annotation, nodes and maps with unique addresses and embed code, a ReST-ful API, integration with Twitter and we hope in the future, other tools and services.