Effective exploration of a landscape full of crowdsourced ideas depends on the right search strategy, as well as the level of granularity in the representation. To categorize similar ideas on different granularity levels modern natural language processing methods and clustering algorithms can be usefully applied. However, the value of machine-based categorizations is dependent on their comprehensibility and coherence with human similarity perceptions. We find that machine-based and human similarity allocations are more likely to converge when comparing ideas across more distant solution clusters than within closely related ones. Our exploratory study contributes to research on the navigability of idea landscapes, by pointing out the impact of granularity on the exploration of crowdsourced knowledge. For practitioners, we provide insights on how to organize the search for the best possible solutions and control the cognitive demand of searchers.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.