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.
I’ve always wondered about toys for young children that mimic the behavior of living things. Is this a good thing, or does it teach (on some basic level) indifference to the pain of others?
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
Meredith Skeels and Jonathan Grudin have written a paper (to be published in GROUP 2009) that examines the use of social networking sites within a large organization. They present interesting demographic data on who uses Facebook vs. LinkedIn (among other such tools), and discuss some interesting findings in how these tools are used (and perceived) in the workplace.In particular, the authors make an interesting comparison between adoption patters of social networking software and email and IM in the corporate arena. For example, they found that social networking tools helped strengthen weak social ties in the workplace, but that it is difficult to measure the ROI. There are also tensions around personal vs. professional uses of the tools that have not been resolved through interface design of existing tools.
It will be interesting to see if these pressures to integrate personal and professional social networks in some contexts but keep them segregated in others will give rise to new tools or interfaces. Given that is unlikely that social network sites will allow their data to be exported, the onus for developing these tools falls on Facebook and LinkedIn. Will they rise to the challenge?
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.
Today is Ada Lovelace Day. Given that I’ve named my child after Ms. Lovelace, I feel obligated and honored to take part in the pledge to “highlight [a] women in technology” that I look up to.
While I’ve many present and past fabulous female colleagues, if I’m to choose one to write about it’s a no-brainer.
Jennifer Mankoff is an associate processor at the Human Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) at Carnegie Mellon University. Jen was my graduate advisor at Berkeley, seeing me through a master’s and PhD. Perhaps “nurse” is a better word, as she not only worked tirelessly with me to improve my abilities but at times literally cared for me when I was ill.
Jen is a whirling dervish. A good Samaritan. A force of nature.
Ada Lovelace Day is today, March 24.
There’s a movement afoot to celebrate by blogging about women in technology and the sciences. More than 1500 bloggers have signed up; you can see the results listed here.
Here’s my contribution: Women in Industrial Research Labs.
In honor of Ada Lovelace Day, I’d like to raise a glass of virtual bubbly to all the amazing women scientists and researchers in the industrial research labs I’ve worked in… especially the ones who inspired and mentored (and hired) me. More below the fold – but first:
Pop! hisssss…gurggurgle… Continue Reading