I was demonstrating the Explorer module within SenseMaker™ during a lecture at Warwick University today. An interesting group of public sector people with some good questions. I used the slides from the NDM conference week and also showed them the way in which in narrative based sense-making we focus on looking for patterns in the metadata, before we look at the data itself (its a way of reducing the impact of researcher bias). In the middle of doing this I suddenly noticed that Cynthia (who developed Explorer) had put the following extract from T S Eliot on the opening screen.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Now I should probably have noticed this before as it is an excellent summary of what happens when we explore narrative. It is both familiar, and strange at the same time. We discover things which appear self evident on discovery, but which we would not have know without the journey.