Original at http://communication.sbs.ohio-state.edu/sense-making/meet/m96gluck.html
04/17/2000
 

SIGNS OF SENSE-MAKING: BLENDING SEMIOTICS AND SENSE-MAKING by Myke Gluck

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.