  Sensemaking and narrative are two inherently interconnected concepts about
how people understand the world around them. Sensemaking is the process by
which people structure and interconnect the information they encounter in the
world with the knowledge and inferences they have made in the past. Narratives
are important constructs that people use sensemaking to create; ones that
reflect provide a more holistic account of the world than the information
within any given narrative is able to alone. Both are important to how human
beings parse the world, and both would be valuable for a computational system
attempting to do the same. In this paper, we discuss theories of sensemaking
and narrative with respect to how people build an understanding of the world
based on the information they encounter, as well as the links between the
fields of sensemaking and narrative research. We highlight a specific
computational task, visual storytelling, whose solutions we believe can be
enhanced by employing a sensemaking and narrative component. We then describe
our system for visual storytelling using sensemaking and narrative and discuss
examples from its current implementation.
