Analytic Provenance and Distributed Sensemaking

Analytic provenance is a record of reasoning over time, accounting for the methods and techniques used. In sensemaking—where people embark on a process of comprehension by which they gain meaning and insight from information—a record of provenance can support the scrutiny of findings, reflection on the reasoning process, and handover of tasks in collaborative settings. However, sensemaking does not occur within a vacuum, and often involves use of various representational media and artifacts such as maps, charts and lists to gain insight. Therefore, a complete account of analytic provenance in sensemaking scenarios must include descriptions of the use of these representational media. In this paper we discuss analytic provenance in the context of distributed sensemaking, showing how we can model the use of representational artifacts and reasoning over time as inference trajectories, introduce levels of description of representational artifacts and discuss challenges faced in the capture of analytic provenance in distributed sensemaking scenarios.