Having seen the recent news of gun-toting protesters at health reform meetings, I got into a discussion with my wife about gun control, and you know where that can lead. Yes, that’s right, to exploratory search. I had some hypotheses about the relationship between gun control and crime, and wanted to find some data to test them. I needed to find some crime statistics by state, and to cross-reference it with some aspects of states, including the degree of urbanization, population density, laws, etc. While I thought the odds of finding a canned analysis of my hypotheses was small given the amount of time I was willing to devote to the problem, I did try a few obvious queries. No luck.
In her talk at the IR Eval workshop at SIGIR 09, Sue Dumais called for an experimental platform for conducting research in information seeking (thanks Sakai-san!). She called it a Living Laboratory. This is a tremendous idea, the high tide that lifts all boats. Whether you’re interested in doing log analysis, interface design evaluation, building new indexing algorithms, or other kinds of research, having real data sets with real users and real information needs can move the field forward in ways that Cranfield-style experiments do not.
In this post, I would like to offer some (unsolicited) advice to graduate students and perhaps to recent graduates about how to further their careers. Some of this is based on personal experience as a student and as someone who has been involved in the hiring process, some of it is advice I’ve received from others, and some of it is conjecture. The advice is both tactical and strategic: I would like to cover things that people should do on a regular basis, and more long-term planning as well. While this advice is aimed at people in HCI and related disciplines, most of it should be broadly applicable.
In response to the question “What will change everything?,” Marti Hearst wrote in edge.org on the increasing ubiquity of video and audio, and on how these media are encroaching on the “market share” of text for communication in our society. It’s an interesting piece: the premise is that as video and audio have become increasingly easy to create and distribute, their use has started supplanting text in communication. She cites examples of success rates of podcasts as marketing vehicles, YouTube video comments, and people pointing cameras on themselves to pose questions to then-presidential candidate Barack Obama.
Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle have written an interesting opinion piece on recent trends in collective intelligence on the Web, something they and others have called Web 2.0. The article covers a lot of ground, touching on everything from medical imaging to politics to Twitter. It is a vision, and one that isn’t so far off: we can see the technological dots forming recognizable patterns. Emboldened by the success of Google, Twitter and Mechanical Turk, the authors call for similar engagement in healthcare, energy policy, and financial regulation, among others.
While what they describe is not exactly a technological Utopia, their picture is somewhat rosy. Continue Reading
Jeremy‘s got an interesting post and discussion on his IR Gupf blog about the process of improving search results. The gist of the discussion is that the process of tweaking search engine performance leads to a local optimum, and cannot be used to discover new interfaces and interaction techniques to support information seeking.
The Economist is running a (moderated) public debate on copyright that should be interesting to those involved in electronic publishing, particularly on the Web. In light of recent attempts by the AP to implement a rather draconian copyright policy this is an issue worth following. AP has tried going after some bloggers and artists, so far without much success. Nonetheless, their published fees for online quoting of excerpts of their content are absurd:
Words
Fees
5 – 25
$12.50
26 – 50
$17.50
51 – 100
$25.00
101 – 250
$50.00
251 and up
$100.00
I don’t mean to imply that they aren’t allowed to protect their intellectual property, particularly in unambiguous (albeit funny) situations, but if these kinds of fees are enforced, it will be prohibitively expensive for most publishers to even mention the titles of AP articles!
I can only hope that the solution that emerges from The Economist debate is a compromise rather than a polarized outcome like the DMCA.
Last week I blogged about Google’s public data visualizations, and suggested that the data lacked transparency that prevented Google’s visualizations from being used critically. Daniel Tunkelang pointed out that the source of the data is linked to the visualization. And indeed it is. So what’s the problem?
