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.

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We’ve created some archives of twitter conversations for SIGIR 2009 and for some of the workshops associated with the conference. These archives are useful because Twitter messages tend to evaporate after a while.

I know of the following archives:

• SIGIR09 proper, based on the #sigir09 and #sigir hashtags
• The IREval workshop based on the #ireval09 hahstag
• The SSM workshop based on the #ssm09 hashtag

If the other workshops had significant traffic, I am happy to archive & update the list above.  TwapperKeeper is a service that archives twitter searches based on a specified hashtag. The data is then available through the web site and for download in tab- or semicolon-separated format. Saving your own copy means that you can refer to it later, and also makes it easier to do data mining or other research on the use of Twitter. I encourage people to download archives (although as new tweets come in the archives will get updated on TwapperKeeper) to make sure they persist even if TwapperKeeper doesn’t. Archive early, archive often.

Diane Kelly presented an interesting (and much tweeted-about) paper at SIGIR this week. The paper, “A Comparsion of Query and Term Suggestion Features for Interactive Searching,” co-written with Karl Gyllstrom and Earl Bailey, looks at the effects that query and term suggestions have on users’ performance and preferences. These are important topics for interactive information seeking, both for known-item and exploratory search.

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