“A Process of Controlled Serendipity”: An Exploratory Study of Historians’ and Digital Historians’ Experiences of Serendipity in Digital Environments

We investigate historians\u27 experiences with serendipity in both physical and digital environments through an online survey. Through a combination of qualitative and quantitative data analyses, our preliminary findings show that many digital historians select a specific digital environment because of the expectation that it may elicit a serendipitous experience. Historians also create heuristic methods of using digital tools to integrate elements of serendipity into their research practice. Four features of digital environments were identified by participants as supporting serendipity: exploration, highlighted triggers, allowed for keyword searching and connected them to other people

Observing Serendipity in Digital Information Environments

We often interact with digital information environments to find useful information. But sometimes useful information finds us unexpectedly, propelling us in new and exciting directions. We might come across information serendipitously when looking for information on something else, or when we are not looking for anything in particular. In previous studies, people have self-reported that they come across information serendipitously. However, there has been limited success in directly observing people doing so. To see if we could have more success, we conducted naturalistic observations of 45 users interacting with different types of digital information environments. Without priming them about serendipity, we asked the users to conduct self-chosen naturalistic information tasks, which varied from broad tasks such as browsing online news to narrow tasks such as finding a particular product to buy. We noted several examples where users either 1) stated they were looking for information on a particular topic or product and unexpectedly found useful/potentially useful information about something else or 2) unexpectedly found useful/potentially useful information when not looking for anything in particular. Our findings suggest that, with a carefully-considered approach, serendipity-related information interaction behaviour can be directly observed. Direct observation allows designers of digital information environments to better understand this behaviour and use this understanding to reason about ways of designing new or improving existing support for serendipity

Discovering the Unfindable: The Tension Between Findability and Discoverability in a Bookshop Designed for Serendipity

Serendipity is a key aspect of user experience, particularly in the context of information acquisition - where it is known as information encountering. Unexpectedly encountering interesting or useful information can spark new insights while surprising and delighting. However, digital environments have been designed primarily for goal-directed seeking over loosely-directed exploration, searching over discovering. In this paper we examine a novel physical environment - a bookshop designed primarily for serendipity - for cues as to how information encountering might be helped or hindered by digital design. Naturalistic observations and interviews revealed it was almost impossible for participants to find specific books or topics other than by accident. But all unexpectedly encoun-tered interesting books, highlighting a tension between findability and discoverability. While some of the bookshop’s design features enabled information en-countering, others inhibited it. However, encountering was resilient, as it occurred despite participants finding it hard to understand the purpose of even those features that did enable it. Findings suggest the need to consider how transparent or opaque the purpose of design features should be and to balance structure and lack of it when designing digital environments for findability and discoverability

CHESTNUT: Improve serendipity in movie recommendation by an Information Theory-based collaborative filtering approach

The term serendipity has been understood narrowly in the Recommender System. Applying a user-centered approach, user-friendly serendipitous recommender systems are expected to be developed based on a good understanding of serendipity. In this paper, we introduce CHESTNUT , a memory-based movie collaborative filtering system to improve serendipity performance. Relying on a proposed Information Theory-based algorithm and previous study, we demonstrate a method of successfully injecting insight, unexpectedness and usefulness, which are key metrics for a more comprehensive understanding of serendipity, into a practical serendipitous runtime system. With lightweight experiments, we have revealed a few runtime issues and further optimized the same. We have evaluated CHESTNUT in both practicability and effectiveness , and the results show that it is fast, scalable and improves serendip-ity performance significantly, compared with mainstream memory-based collaborative filtering. The source codes of CHESTNUT are online at https://github.com/unnc-idl-ucc/CHESTNUT/

Seeking Serendipity: The Art of Finding the Unsought in Professional Music

Serendipity is a valuable constituent of professional work. In order to ‘control’ the phenomenon it is important to gain insight in its processes and influencing factors. This study examined two cases of serendipitous information behavior in professional improvised music, a domain often associated with unpredictability. The aim of the study was to validate McCay-Peet and Toms’ latest model on work-related serendipitous experiences. The study followed a semi-structured interview procedure that consisted of three one-hour interview sessions to select cases and collect data. Results show that our data fit the model. Process elements like ‘trigger’, ‘connection’, ‘valuable outcome’, ‘unexpected thread’, and ‘perception of serendipity’ were identified, as well as factors such as ‘trigger-rich’, ‘openness’, and ‘prepared mind’. We also identified other factors (i.e., ‘curiosity’, ‘interest’, and ‘initiative’) that might influence serendipitous discovery. Additional (multi) case studies are necessary to generalize findings

On Birthing Dancing Stars: The Need for Bounded Chaos in Information Interaction

While computers causing chaos is acommon social trope, nearly the entirety of the history of computing is dedicated to generating order. Typical interactive information retrieval tasks ask computers to support the traversal and exploration of large, complex information spaces. The implicit assumption is that they are to support users in simplifying the complexity (i.e. in creating order from chaos). But for some types of task, particularly those that involve the creative application or synthesis of knowledge or the creation of new knowledge, this assumption may be incorrect. It is increasingly evident that perfect order—and the systems we create with it—support highly-structured information tasks well, but provide poor support for less-structured tasks.We need digital information environments that help create a little more chaos from order to spark creative thinking and knowledge creation. This paper argues for the need for information systems that offerwhat we term ‘bounded chaos’, and offers research directions that may support the creation of such interface

Can dissonance engineering improve risk analysis of human–machine systems?

The paper discusses dissonance engineering and its application to risk analysis of human–machine systems. Dissonance engineering relates to sciences and technologies relevant to dissonances, defined as conflicts between knowledge. The richness of the concept of dissonance is illustrated by a taxonomy that covers a variety of cognitive and organisational dissonances based on different conflict modes and baselines of their analysis. Knowledge control is discussed and related to strategies for accepting or rejecting dissonances. This acceptability process can be justified by a risk analysis of dissonances which takes into account their positive and negative impacts and several assessment criteria. A risk analysis method is presented and discussed along with practical examples of application. The paper then provides key points to motivate the development of risk analysis methods dedicated to dissonances in order to identify the balance between the positive and negative impacts and to improve the design and use of future human–machine system by reinforcing knowledge

Retrieving haystacks: a data driven information needs model for faceted search.

The research aim was to develop an understanding of information need characteristics for word co-occurrence-based search result filters (facets). No prior research has been identified into what enterprise searchers may find useful for exploratory search and why. Various word co-occurrence techniques were applied to results from sample queries performed on industry membership content. The results were used in an international survey of 54 practising petroleum engineers from 32 organizations. Subject familiarity, job role, personality and query specificity are possible causes for survey response variation. An information needs model is presented: Broad, Rich, Intriguing, Descriptive, General, Expert and Situational (BRIDGES). This may help professionals to more effectively meet their information needs and stimulate new needs, improving a systems ability to facilitate serendipity. This research has implications for faceted search in enterprise search and digital library deployments

Investigating serendipity: How it unfolds and what may influence it

Serendipity is not an easy word to define. Its meaning has been stretched to apply to experiences ranging from the mundane to the exceptional. Serendipity, however, is consistently associated with unexpected and positive personal, scholarly, scientific, organizational, and societal events and discoveries. Diverse serendipitous experiences share a conceptual space; therefore, what lessons can we draw from an exploration of how serendipity unfolds and what may influence it? This article describes an investigation of work-related serendipity. Twelve professionals and academics from a variety of fields were interviewed. The core of the semi-structured interviews focused on participants' own work-related experiences that could be recalled and discussed in depth. This research validated and augmented prior research while consolidating previous models of serendipity into a single model of the process of serendipity, consisting of: Trigger, Connection, Follow-up, and Valuable Outcome, and an Unexpected Thread that runs through 1 or more of the first 4 elements. Together, the elements influence the Perception of Serendipity. Furthermore, this research identified what factors relating to the individual and their environment may facilitate the main elements of serendipity and further influence its perception

Measuring the dimensions of serendipity in digital environments

Introduction - Serendipitous information retrieval is the perhaps inevitable consequence of immersion in an information-rich environment. Just how well chance encounters are supported, however, within these environments varies and one of the challenges to the development of tools and systems to facilitate serendipity is measuring how well they achieve this goal. This research developed a scale to measure dimensions of serendipity identified in prior research. Method - Participants (N=123) browsed an experimental information search system for twenty minutes with no a priori task and responded to a twenty-item survey questionnaire. Items were derived from the serendipity dimensions of a physical library setting devised by Björneborn. Analysis - Exploratory factor analysis using the Principal Component Analysis as the method of extraction was carried out on the data. The analysis was undertaken using the SPSS statistical package. Results - Five factors were extracted representing core elements of support for serendipity in a digital environment: enabled connections, introduced the unexpected, presented variety, triggered divergence, and induced curiosity. In addition, four of the original twenty items were eliminated from the survey. Conclusions - While the physical dimensions of serendipity do map on to the digital dimensions, it is unknown whether there are additional dimensions of serendipity not present in the physical environment