Dr. Simon Attfield (Middlesex University)

In this talk I plan to revisit work I presented some years ago, but in a way that has relevance for issues of ‘provenance’ and ‘fluidity and rigour’ currently being discussed in the VALCRI project. A field study of journalists working in the newsroom at The Times looked at how they sought and worked with information when writing news articles for the daily edition. The study showed that the task is affected by evolving uncertainty. This led to a research system called Newsharvester which was designed as ‘uncertainty tolerant’ through a very simple feature providing provenance links from a developing collection of content to originating archival sources. In an experimental evaluation, users reported that the provenance feature promoted more flexible and dynamic working and increased user enjoyment. Included in the reasons for using the provenance links were to re-consult information to better understand the context, include specific items they hadn’t realised were important, and generally check for omissions. The study lends support to the idea of  ‘low-cost’ provenance links as promoting ‘fluidity’ for users during complex sensemaking tasks conducted under time-pressure.