[DC] The Immersive Space to Think: Immersive Analytics for Multimedia Data

Recent improvements in technologies for augmented reality and virtual reality have enabled new ways of performing meaningful sensemaking on research-based tasks. This area of research, immersive analytics, allows for users to offload cognitive processing onto the environment and leverage distributed cognition to more easily extract concepts and themes from many disparate data sources. Immersive analytics has previously been mostly restricted to large abstract numerical or quantitative datasets. However, sensemaking based on text, image, video, or audio is also a cognitively intensive task. I propose to design, develop, and refine software that enables immersive analytics of qualitative data. Furthermore, I propose to research both novice user sensemaking and collaborative sensemaking using this software to better understand users utilize space to offload cognition.