CITATION AND COPYRIGHT INFORMATION:
Cite as: Gluck, M. (1996). Signs of Sense-Making: Blending semiotics and Sense-Making. Paper presented at a non-divisional workshop held at the meeting of the International Communication Association, Chicago.
© Myke Gluck (1996).

ESSENCE OF PROJECT:
As an epistemology and method for revealing information needs and uses, Sense-Making privileges individual respondents in their situation while making the situation the unit of analysis. As developed during this century, semiotics focuses upon understanding the construction, use and meaning of signs, myths, metaphors, and metonymies while privileging the expert semiotician. Sense-making and semiotics each constitute a strategy to understand information-in-use phenomena contributing to our understanding of human behavior and communication. This project explores the feasibility of a collaboration for mutual informing of these two approaches to better understand the active use of information. I approach this collaboration in two ways:

1. I describe the six possible pairings of vertices or mappings of the Dervin situation micromoment step triad of event, gap, and uses to the Piercian sign triad of referent, sign vehicle, and interpretant.
2. I describe an investigation to correlate semiotician’s and user’s views of signs associated with the same domain (geographic content of Fortune 100 Annual Reports).

To begin this exploration I describe the referent as the backdrop of the life world upon which signs occur, the sign vehicle as the stimulus for signing, and interpretant as the focus of meaning of a sign and explore the consequences of the different pairings of these with the vertices of the Dervin triad.

CAUTION: DETAILS:
(Skip to "Reasons I took this Road" section if in a hurry) For example: what are some of the implications for mutual informings of Sense-Making and semiotics of the following pairing (just one of the six possible mapped pairings)?

Mapping #1:

event <-- referent;

gap <-- sign vehicle;

uses <-- interpretant

This configuration considers the role of the event within the situation as the external realist datum corresponding to the referent of a sign, the gap or user concern (operationalized as a question the user asks aloud or ponders at the event) serves as the sign vehicle, and the uses which (operationalized as helps or hurts of the responses) the user elicited or thought in response to the gap serve as the interpretant of the sign.

This mapping posits uses as the arbitrator of meaning (interpretant), downplaying though not ignoring the role of the gap (sign vehicle) and the event (referent) as components of meaning. The gap is seen in this mapping as a direct stimulus or trigger for fostering a need for making sense. Different users in the same event may not perceive the same gap; there is no deterministic relationship, quite within postmodern views of semiotics, that does not insist upon a singular correspondence between sign vehicle and interpretant for all users, times, and places. This mapping further emphasizes the role of the event as the background or manifest objective, intersubjective or reflective reality through which the user passes constructing or constraining his or her life world. The event is the routinized aspect of life that connects users to the whole of the situation and to the parallel yet concurrent situations of their existence at the same or different temporal and spatial scales. The event is not the direct stimulus of the need to make sense but, rather, locates the unacknowledged preconditions for needing to make sense as well as the stage for the playing out of the unintended consequences of the actions or lack of action based upon the use of a response (the interpretant).

The understandings of how users might articulate sign components in this mapping may well be informing to semioticians. The creation of signs by users as they proceed to make sense through the association of gap as sign vehicle, event as referent, and uses as interpretant presents new signs and an alternative route for semioticians to discovery the signs humans contingently create along side the semiotician’s analytic stand for relations and sign production necessities. Similarly, the user may find new frameworks for resolving information needs if the processes of semiosis were made more manifest in the process of resolving information needs and preferences.

This appears to be the most straightforward linking of Dervin to Pierce yet the other five mappings would have interesting things to share between the approaches if found when correlating the results of Sense-Making with semiotic analysis from the investigation posed below.

REASONS I TOOK THIS ROAD:
Semiotics, the study by experts of ‘stand for’ relations, explores how we construct and use signs such as icons, indexes, and symbols. Semiotic analysis focuses on both how we describe and combine signs, and their meanings. Clearly, the act of semiosis is filled with issues of language, culture, communication, and the development of ontological security: We live by metaphors. Traditional semiotics was quite positivist in approach seeking ‘the meaning’ and ‘the best’ signs; postmodern semiotics begins to examine the variety of signs in more inclusive ways. Sense-Making explores how all of us come to make sense of the world when our routinized life world encounters discontinuities. The act of sense- making and its associated activities are influenced by and, in turn, influence language, culture, communication, and our ontological security. Semioticians lack a mechanism to obtain user-based input and Sense-Making has often only indirectly explored the issue of meaning. (Making sense does not see to me to be the same as meaning.) Out of curiosity and hope I have begun traveling a road to see how Sense-Making and semiotics might be mutually informing: Sense-making has a view of humans and a method that may be informing to semioticians and semioticians have ways of describing relations between objects in the world with their interpretations that may be informing to those studying Sense-Making as well as sense-makers (read sense-makers as all of us!).

THE BEST OF WHAT I HAVE ACHIEVED IS:

1. I have raised the question and suggested a process for these two approaches to be mutually informing regarding information-in-use.
2. I have begun to explore a possible mechanism for collaboration between the two approaches by first describing the six mappings of the Dervin micromoment triad and the Piercian sign triad.
3. I have outlined an investigation to delve more deeply into the relationships between the two approaches.

WHAT HAS BEEN PARTICULARLY HELPFUL IN THIS PROJECT:
Clearly, Dervin and her collaborator’s work in Sense-Making has been invaluable, especially the pieces entitled "From the mind’s eye of the user" and "Chaos, order and sense-making: a proposed theory for information design." I have also found Alan MacEachren’s text on "How maps work," Gottdenier’s text "Postmodern semiotics," and Sless’ book " In search of semiotics" to be valuable. I now invite input help.

WHAT I HAVE STRUGGLED WITH IN THIS PROJECT:
I am struggling with the design of the investigation to collect data and enquire about the mutual informing. Here is a description of the investigation. I actively seek your insights.

The signs and symbols of a situation or context usually do not present gaps to respondents. We claim Sense-Making gaps present the opportunity for respondents to articulate these normally assumed meanings for signs and symbols of the contextual background.

We now describe an exploratory experiment to probe the six mappings of the Pierce triad with the Dervin triad and their potential for mutually informing semiotician and sense-maker. The experiment has three phases:

1. A semiotician will perform an analysis of the content of materials from a domain for the structure of signs with their mechanisms of chaining (similar to how words are chained to form a sentence) and for the semantic or meaning patterns present. Such analysis, independent of its correlation with Sense-Making, may assist information system builders to construct information systems to better support the resolution of information needs of real users.
2. Respondents will participate in Sense-Making interviews with the same materials. Such a Sense-Making analysis will provide semioticians with respondent or user-based input that is not normally available to them to form their understanding of semiosis (process of making signs) within the context of a situation.
3. The six mappings of the Pierce and Dervin triads will be considered in conjunction with the data of the first two phases seeking mutually informing frameworks for shared understandings and development of meanings.

Stock brokers, stock purchasers, and consumers of specific Fortune 100 company products or services constitute participants for this experiment. They will be asked to describe in a Sense-Making time line the events in their decision to purchase the stock or product from a Fortune 100 company. Respondents will also be asked to indicate questions they had while investigating the purchase of the stock or product. The respondents will then discuss the expected and actual helps of the responses to their questions in the process of buying the product or stock. Respondents will then be shown the annual reports from the Fortune 100 company producing the product or issuing the stock they had recently purchased. They will be asked to examine these documents indicating any geographic images (text, photos, maps, etc.) they find as they proceed through the document and indicate whether or not and how such images might affect their holding, selling or buying more stock from the company or their satisfaction with the product or willingness to purchase the product again. These Sense-Making interviews will also produce a user-based syntax for the geographic information in the situations of buying a company’s stock or product. Participants will further indicate if the geospatial images seen or read in the annual reports relate to the questions they had at events in their stock or product purchase situation.

Also, respondents will be asked to indicate ideal geospatial images that might have been more useful to them in their use of specific responses to their questions and how these ideals might have been useful when they had the question. This discussion of relations of the geographic imagery in text and pictures to their information needs presents a semantic analysis of geographic imagery.

WHAT WOULD HELP NOW:
Suggestions, comments, and support in designing and operationalizing the experiment described above.

PROJECT ABSTRACT:
As an epistemology and method for revealing information needs and uses, Sense-Making privileges individual respondents in their situation while making the situation the unit of analysis. As developed during this century, semiotics focuses upon understanding the construction, use and meaning of signs, myths, metaphors, and metonymies while privileging the expert semiotician. Sense-Making and semiotics each constitute a strategy to understand information-in-use phenomena, contributing to our understanding of human behavior and communication. This project explores the feasibility of a collaboration of these two approaches to better understand the active use of information. We proceed in this work with the hope that such mutual informing of Sense-Making respondents and researchers with semiotic expert analysts will open up new directions and provide additional meaningful expressions for the ontological, epistemological, and methodological foundations of each approach. This project has two goals: 1) To explore commingling sense-making and semiotic approaches to better understand information-in-use phenomena providing a theoretical unfolding, and 2) To explore empirical processes to assist in exposing the contingent aspects of the theoretical discourse.

OTHER MATERIALS BY THIS AUTHORS ON THIS WEB SITE:
See: http://communication.sbs.ohio-state.edu/sense-making/AAauthors/authorlistgluck.html