What is a memo?
In Fora Voices, when you make a highlight you have the ability to write a note that you can refer to later on in the Sensemaking process. This memo should include two components:
- The name of the question section in your conversation guide from which the response coincides
- Your initial thoughts or impressions about the highlight
Let's take a look at the highlight below. The first part of the memo indicates that the highlight is from the “Story for Starters” section of the conversation guide. The latter half of the memo summarizes the highlight as being about “concerns about AI.”
Turning memos into codes.
Think of memoing as the practice of annotating a book. You are writing down your reactions, summaries, and ideas about highlights that you create. Later on in the coding and tagging phase of Sensemaking, you can refer to your memos as food for thought when deciding how to adequately tag each highlight.
In the example below, the codes “Natural Gas and Oil” and “Worry of future employment” were tagged to the highlight based on what the speaker was saying. The sensemakers in this project did not decide to use “Concerns about AI” as a code in their codebook, but they did capture a sentiment related to those concerns in their code regarding future employment.