The information seeking community seems to be experiencing a renewed interest in session-based approaches to information seeking after years of focusing on single-query interaction. Yesterday at CHI2010, Anne Aula, Rehan M. Khan, and Zhiwei Guan reported on a study of searchers’ behavior. Rather than looking at single-query performance, they analyzed searchers’ query reformulation tactics to characterize difficult vs. easy search tasks. They found a variety of indicators that correlate with users’ difficulties in articulating efficient queries. This work is important as it hints at the possibility that web search engines can diagnose user behavior and alter the interaction with users to facilitate their search process.

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Yesterday Miles Efron and I presented our work on Twitter search at the CHI 2010 microblogging workshop.We distinguished between macro- and micro-level research on  Twitter, and then focused on Twitter search from the end-user’s perspective. We talked about the role that test collections should play in evaluation of search interfaces. The slides are shown below.

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Twitter is a trending topic in HCI research these days. The ICWSM conference is awash with interesting papers on mining and analyzing the Twitter stream, and the upcoming CHI 2010 microblogging workshop promises to be full of interesting discussion on a range of topics around how people use Twitter to communicate.

One of the established ways of studying Twitter use is to collect samples of tweets (e.g., see here) to perform statistical and social network analysis to understand the patterns latent in the tweets. This makes for interesting and (furthermore) publishable research.

On the other hand, the focus on large datasets and aggregate behavior forgets about individual. Not about the individual as a person who contributes tweets to the larger collection, but about the individual who needs to use Twitter to meet his or her information needs.

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The work honored with the paper award at the ECIR 2010 conference described an experiment that assessed the effectiveness of a case-based reasoning mechanism for suggesting possible actions for users engaged in an exploratory search task. The authors constructed DAFFODIL, a sophisticated interface for issuing queries, for saving documents, and for suggesting potentially useful query expansion terms. They performed a preliminary evaluation of the system on three search tasks, and compared subjects’ performance and behavior patterns with and without system-generated suggestions.

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Yesterday Google announced that their bookmarks can now be shared. So far, so social media. What’s interesting about it is the motivating scenario:

Sharing lists can help you collaborate with your friends on common interests or activities. Let’s say you’re planning a group trip to Paris. With a list, everyone can contribute useful links and resources, such as packing lists, hotel links, flight information and attractions.

The key characteristic that distinguishes this scenario from typical “ask (or mine) your social network” types of search is that here you and your friends have a shared information need, and you are all contributing your efforts and expertise toward that goal. The system doesn’t have to figure out that you all are planning a trip to Paris together — that would be a hard inference to make. Rather, you tell it, explicitly, what you’re doing, and it helps you work on that information need together.

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Michael Bernstein and the usual suspects wrote a nice position paper for the CHI2010 microblogging workshop. They describe Eddi, a system that allows people to group tweets by topic to make sense of large numbers of tweets. In some sense, they are addressing a similar problem to the one that Miles Efron and I tackled in our paper. In both cases, the system uses various sorts of analysis to group and filter tweets to help people understand the collection or the stream.

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Kate Ehrlich and N. Sadat Shami have written a paper (accepted to ICWSM 2010) that compares IBMers’ use of Twitter and an internal micro-blogging tool (with the unfortunate title of BlueTwit). The paper analyzes tweeting patterns of 34 people over a four month period. The authors found that people in their sample tended to use both system more for question asking/answering and dissemination of information than for status updates, which contrasts with Namaan et al.’s finding that “meformers” (i.e., people who tweet about what they are up to) out-number “informers” in the sample they analyzed.

Ehrlich and Shami’s study found that people used these tools to improve the social status: internally to manage their reputation, to be seen as a source of useful answers rather than just of questions, and on Twitter both to promote their company and to develop their professional status.

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Social computing is the future of interaction, explains Michael Bernstein, and he has a point. Leveraging the work of others rather than recreating it is the way civilizations are built. But that is not the whole story. There are instances when leveraging the work of others is the right thing to do, but there are also many situations where it is undesirable for moral, aesthetic, and practical reasons. The moral side is obvious — the undesirability of appropriating others’ work without their permission isn’t that controversial — but the aesthetic and practical aspects of reusing others’ content bear some additional scrutiny.

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Yesterday Yahoo! announced that it reached an agreement with Twitter to incorporate the twitter feed into its properties in a variety of ways, including surfacing tweets related to particular topics, return  more tweets in search results, and allow users to read their tweets and tweet directly from their Yahoo! pages. The move is interesting more as another vote for the importance of Twitter as a communication channel than in the value it introduces into people’s interactions with Yahoo!

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Yesterday I had the pleasure to attend a lecture at UCLA given by Peter Ingwersen, Professor of Information Retrieval and Seeking, Royal School of Library and Information Science, Denmark. Peter was the 2009/2010 recipient of the Contribution to Information Science & Technology Award from the Los Angeles chapter of ASIS&T, the 21st person to be so honored.  He gave an interesting talk on frameworks in information seeking which explored the philosophical foundations of the “Cranfield paradigm” and proposed ways of extending the approach to incorporate the behaviors of–gasp!–real users!

Drawing on material from his book (co-written with Kalervo Järvelin) “The Turn: Integration of Information Seeking and Retrieval in Context“, he described his “Spaceship” model

A general analytical model of information seeking and retrieval (from Information Research Vol. 10 No. 1, October 2004)

Professor of Information Retrieval and
Seeking, Royal School of Library and Information Science, Denmark

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