A shape is a graphical representation of an object’s form or its external boundary, outline, or external surface. — Wikipedia, retrieved May 13, 2026 Most of the time, we grow up with an understanding of “shape” without needing to have it articulated. For some of us, or our children or grandchildren, that sense isContinue reading “Stories and Shapes: An Interlude”
Category Archives: Sensemaking
The Sorcerer’s App
On January 28th, Nature published a brief news story by science writer and editor Sara Phillips about the latest threat from AI to online veracity, in this case, the virtual undetectability of chatbots responding to social science surveys. The centerpiece of the story was a peer-reviewed paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy ofContinue reading “The Sorcerer’s App”
Narrative Landscapes, Part I:
The emperor has no clothes that fit
The term “landscape” has something powerfully seductive about it. The imagery it evokes is so appealing, that further thought can be completely suspended. — Jones (1995) Seductive indeed: use story-related data on a contour plot to identify clusters or loci of desirable and undesirable responses; look at plausible pathways across the “topography” between these loci;Continue reading “Narrative Landscapes, Part I:
The emperor has no clothes that fit”
Statistics in the Triad, Part IX: Entropy, or How Much the Data Are Concentrated
The two previous posts in this series looked at where sensemaking story data are concentrated in a ternary. Part VIIIa explored the use of a non-parametric method for calculating smooth (continuous) contour lines, essentially a data-driven “guess” at the density of story points. Part VIIIb gave examples of a simpler, albeit less elegant, alternative —Continue reading “Statistics in the Triad, Part IX: Entropy, or How Much the Data Are Concentrated”
Statistics in the Triad, Part VI: The Story as Unit of Observation
If you had asked me a year ago to identify the primary unit of observation in a SenseMaker project, I would have said, without much hesitation, it’s the story, of course. When I started writing Part IV in this series on Confidence Regions, however, I had to revisit that question. I knew what was typicallyContinue reading “Statistics in the Triad, Part VI: The Story as Unit of Observation”
The Man Who Mistook His Graph for a Hat
Equilateral triangles have been used as a graphical tool for presenting compositional data for at least 150 years, most prominently in geology, metallurgy, and related areas of physical chemistry; archeology and anthropology; and population studies, including genetics. According to Howarth (1996)[paywall], they were also used as early as the 18th century to show mixing ofContinue reading “The Man Who Mistook His Graph for a Hat”
‘The Eggshell Thing’
This post originally appeared on the Cognitive Edge blog on December 15, 2010. My first project as an accredited practitioner was with a large international publisher that was trying to get a better sense of customer satisfaction with its products. I can still remember having some “disconnects” along the lines of, whoa, how does thatContinue reading “‘The Eggshell Thing’”