1 research outputs found
Everything you always wanted to know about a dataset: studies in data summarisation
Summarising data as text helps people make sense of it. It also improves data
discovery, as search algorithms can match this text against keyword queries. In
this paper, we explore the characteristics of text summaries of data in order
to understand how meaningful summaries look like. We present two complementary
studies: a data-search diary study with 69 students, which offers insight into
the information needs of people searching for data; and a summarisation study,
with a lab and a crowdsourcing component with overall 80 data-literate
participants, which produced summaries for 25 datasets. In each study we
carried out a qualitative analysis to identify key themes and commonly
mentioned dataset attributes, which people consider when searching and making
sense of data. The results helped us design a template to create more
meaningful textual representations of data, alongside guidelines for improving
data-search experience overall