Making Sense of Rich Data Collections on Mobile Devices

Abstract

Mobile phones today offer great opportunities for capturing information enabled by sensor capabilities. A challenge, however, is to create meaningful order in this increasing amount of heterogeneous data and to exploit it in proficient ways. In this paper we present ContextCatcher, a mobile phone application for creating rich multimedia repositories and information collections on mobile devices. This software enables capturing a variety of file formats, for example, photos, videos, text, GPS locations, etc. Moreover, ContextCatcher facilitates the aggregation of these files into ContextObjects, which can be thought of as container structures for bundling the file collections. We describe a study featuring 18 participants, who created 681 media files contained within 80 ContextObjects. We analyze this data to explore its underlying structure and the emergent relations between the files through the lens of sensemaking. Finally, we show why the ContextCatcher concept can both be helpful in information foraging and sensemaking.