For quite a while now Jeremy and I have been characterizing collaborative exploratory search, and distinguishing it from other kinds of searches. While so far the exercise has been largely theoretical, and sometimes has been met with skepticism. Well, in Tuesday’s Washington Post, I found a passage that illustrates the kinds of activities we are talking about.
A week or so ago, we wrote a post on Social Search, and how (we believe) it is different from Collaborative Search. We have also begun laying out a taxonomy of the various factors or dimensions that characterize information seeking behaviors involving more than one person. So far, we have listed two dimensions: Intent and Synchronization. We will continue with two additional dimensions over the next few weeks: Depth and Location.
But in the meantime, we note that Intent and Synchronization already give us enough material to draw descriptive and discriminatory lines between various types of multi-user search.
The Princeton Companion to Mathematics, which came out just a few month ago, contains a wonderful short section entitled “Advice to a Young Mathematician” with advice from five eminent mathematicians. I was in the need of inspiration this weekend, and found some in these personal statements. Below the fold you will find a few excerpts applicable to any researcher of any age.
Readers: Please help me and other readers of this blog by posting in the comments section pointers to your favorite sources of research advice.
Kim Krause Berg recently wrote about the pleasure of reading a book (a tree-book!) compared to reading online (i.e., in a web browser, at a laptop). She is “not ready to let go of [the printed book], yet,” she says. I’m with her so far. Continue Reading
In an earlier post, I described briefly the DICE system and the paper we are publishing on it. At the time I wrote it, I had forgotten that we had a short YouTube video of an early version of the system.
The video demonstrates how to use DICE to schedule and run meetings.
See the FXPAL YouTube page for more videos of FXPAL research.
This is the third post by Jeremy and me in a series on collaborative information seeking. The first was an introduction to the space, and the second dealt with the topic of collaborative intent. This post deals with synchronization of data that underlies the collaboration. While it is possible to collaborate in searching for information without tool support by exchanging URLs or documents directly, more interesting interactions are possible when they are mediated by the search system.
A quick reminder of this event in Palo Alto this evening. Tonight’s event is a joint program of SDForum Virtual World SIG and the SDForum Tech Women’s Program featuring a panel of women who build, create, and work in virtual worlds ranging from NASA to games to Second Life. Directions here.
FXPAL has a YouTube page where we publish various videos of research systems. Right now, the following recent projects have one or more vidoes on the site
Recently, a new class of search applications that support collaborative information seeking has emerged. In these systems, users work in small groups with a shared information need, rather than relying on large numbers of anonymous users with potentially diverging information needs. One clear way to distinguish different social search activities has been proposed by Colum Foley. In his PhD thesis, he characterizes search systems on two dimensions, “Sharing of Knowledge” and “Division of labor.” Sharing of knowledge separates all social search systems from traditional single-user approaches, while division of labor separates social search from collaborative search.
This is Part 2 of (at least) 5 in a series of posts about Collaborative Information Seeking. Part 1 is found here.
The most important dimension for distinguishing between various types of collaboration is the intent with which users of a system approach each other for the collaboration.