Supporting the Assessment of Rigor: Representing Analysis to Create Process Insight

Our recent research with professional information analysts has revealed promising directions for representing and sharing analyses to create process insight, suggesting two related directions for developing effective representations that support the assessment of rigor. First, our study suggests that effective representation incorporates a synthesis of critical process attributes, finding that analysts viewed analytic rigor as a multi-attribute assessment of sufficiency. Second, the research suggests that an effective representation for revealing analytic rigor facilitates the emergence of a participatory exchange among stakeholders. These two findings indicate that developing an effective representation for creating insight into an analytic process embeds indicators of critical process attributes into a participatory exchange interaction. Our approach for supporting rigor assessment builds a virtual map to the data space behind an analysis—a visualization that affords active shifting among organizing views of critical attributes of an analysis process. (Length: 20:19)