## Digital Lab Book User Guide This is a walk-through user guide for the Digital Lab Book. :: # Pre-Requisites ::: # Git Git is a so-called version control system. At its start there is a "repository" which contains files you want git to observe. Git tracks changes to these files and directories in the repository and allows branching into different versions. All without losing the ability to revert those changes to any previous state ("commit") in the history of the repository. To learn more about git visit [https://git-scm.com/about](https://git-scm.com/about). ::: # Provenance Provenance is the information about the sources involved in producing something. For example think of a slide presentation that multiple people are working on. Provenance is information on who changed and added what and when. Here we are concerned with the provenance of scientific work using interactive visualization. This means we are interested in knowing the steps that a scientist takes when they interactively use a visualization application with the goal of knowledge discovery and sensemaking. ::: # Sensemaking Sensemaking is a process that describes how analysts perform tasks in two main loops: the foraging loop, and the sensemaking loop. In the foraging loop analysts find sources, skim them to identify topics, and lightly organize them by theme. In the sensemaking loop, analysts further extract data from the sources, create hypotheses and tell the story that lies beneath the sources With provenance information we can track this process of sensemaking and make reproducing the reasoning for found insights and results easier. ::: # Provenance Repository What we call a provenance repository is a git repository under the hood that tracks the interaction history of users with a visualization application. It also includes several other sources of information on the sensemaking process such as manually created notes, a mind map, screenshots of each visualization state etc. :: # New Topic