Exploring Opportunities to Facilitate Serendipity in Search

Rahman, Ataur; Wilson, Max L.

doi:10.1145/2766462.2767783

Cited by 18 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…Serendipity was studied in different contexts, such as everyday life information seeking behavior (Savolainen, 1995), pleasure reading (Ross, 1999), exposure to online news (Yadamsuren and Heinström, 2011), knowledge work (McCay-Peet and Toms, 2010), research in the fields of history, literature and education (Rose, 2013;Martin and Quan-Haase, 2013;Fyfe, 2015), information architecture in libraries (Carr, 2015) and serendipity in web search and digital information environment (Bawden, 2011;Rahman and Wilson, 2015). But, even though serendipity has gained continued interest in many fields, the subject matter of legal information chance encounters by law practitioners has been only scantily and mostly indirectly addressed.…”

Section: Serendipitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Serendipity in legal information seeking behavior

Solomon

Bronstein

2015

Aslib Journal of Information Management

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Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of serendipity in legal information seeking behavior of family law advocates, whom act in a challenging information environment that lacks published court rulings. Design/methodology/approach – A quantitative research using a web-based structured questionnaire, among Israeli family law advocates. Single stage systematic sampling, with random starting point and no recurring pattern of each sixth family law advocate on the Israel Bar Advocates List, was applied. Data from 135 Israeli family law advocates were used for analysis. Findings – Electronic information sources were found as most serendipitous; family law advocates were identified as super encounterers; four types of professional background concerns and seven legal professional contributions of the unexpected encounters with court rulings, were identified. Furthermore, findings support several frameworks presented on earlier information encounter literature. Research limitations/implications – Data absence on demographic and professional variables distributions of Israeli family law advocates was a limiting factor, compensated by the systematic sampling method used, thus can be regarded to reflect the views of the entire study population. Surveys’ reliance on self-reporting recalls of serendipitous events is also a limiting factor, though predicted and acceptable in this matter since chance encounters occur unexpectedly and are complex to capture. Practical implications – Chance encounters may expose lawyers to meaningful information it is unlikely they were able to find because its limited publication, and assist them keep up with current law for better serves their clients. Originality/value – The study augments the current empirically based knowledge on serendipity and provides insights into legal information chance encounters among a little-studied group of knowledge workers: family law advocates.

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Section: Serendipitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Serendipity in legal information seeking behavior

Solomon

Bronstein

2015

Aslib Journal of Information Management

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“…Sonnenwald et al, 2001), thus counteracting limiting 'filter bubbles' (Pariser, 2011), has in recent years created increased attention on how physical and digital environments can be designed to facilitate serendipity. Examples here include (mentioning only few selected references) workplace design (Jeffrey and McGrath, 2000), urban design (Zuckerman, 2011), library design , search engines (Rahman and Wilson, 2015), music recommendation (Taramigkou et al, 2013), and much more.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Three key affordances for serendipity

Björneborn

2017

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Purpose-Serendipity is an interesting phenomenon to study in information science as it plays a fundamentalbut perhaps underestimatedrole in how we discover, explore, and learn in all fields of life. The purpose of this paper is to operationalize the concept of serendipity by providing terminological 'building blocks' for understanding connections between environmental and personal factors in serendipitous encounters. Understanding these connections is essential when designing affordances in physical and digital environments that can facilitate serendipity. Approach-In this paper, serendipity is defined as what happens when we, in unplanned ways, encounter resources (information, things, people, etc.) that we find interesting. In the outlined framework, serendipity is understood as an affordance, i.e. a usage potential when environmental and personal factors correspond with each other. The framework introduces three key affordances for facilitating serendipity: diversifiability, traversability, and sensoriability, covering capacities of physical and digital environments to be diversified, traversed, and sensed. The framework is structured around couplings between the three key affordances and three key personal serendipity factors: curiosity, mobility, and sensitivity. Ten sub-affordances for serendipity and ten coupled personal sub-factors are briefly outlined. Related research is compared with and mapped into the framework aiming at a theoretical validation. The affordance approach to serendipity is discussed, including different degrees and types of serendipity. Findings-All the terminological 'building blocks' in the framework are seen to resonate with the included related research. Serendipity is found to be a commonplace phenomenon in everyday life. It is argued that we cannot "engineer" nor "design" serendipity per se, but can design affordances for serendipity. Serendipity may thus be intended by designers, but must always be unplanned by users. The outlined affordance approach to serendipity points to the importance of our sensory-motor abilities to discover and explore serendipitous affordances. Research implications/limitations-Implications of the framework for designing physical and digital environments with affordances for serendipity are briefly considered. It is suggested that physical environments may have a primacy regarding affordances of sensoriability for facilitating serendipity, and digital environments a primacy regarding traversability, whereas physical and digital environments may afford similar degrees of diversifiability. In future research, the framework needs further empirical validation in physical and digital environments. Originality/value-No other research has been found addressing affordances for serendipity and connections between environmental and personal factors in similarly detailed ways. The outlined framework and typology may function as a baseline for further serendipity studies.

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“…Interested in serendipitous discoveries in Web search, Rahman and Wilson (2015) deployed a working search engine that highlighted results matched with social media data. 14 participants were recruited to use the search engine, and their queries and clicks were logged by system.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In contrast, Rahman and Wilson (2015) identified the relevance of the micro-serendipity model to web search directly based on feedback diaries which ask participants to record the events of interest to researchers, often according to some pre-defined questions. Because of the explicitly stated requirements on how and when to make the recording, the resulting data is accurate and objective and can be analyzed to address existing research problems.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Toward a description framework of information encountering experiences

Jiang

Song

2020

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PurposeOne of the primary challenges of conducting information encountering (IE) research is the difficulty in capturing people's IE experiences. The purpose of this paper is to develop a general description framework of IE experiences as guidance for participants to record diary entries in diary studies of IE.Design/methodology/approach340 descriptions of IE incidents were collected from 18 previous IE studies as secondary data. A thematic analysis of the secondary data engendered a general description framework of IE experiences composed of 9 main themes and 31 sub-themes. The framework was then applied in a diary study to investigate Generation Z's online IE behavior.FindingsThe nine main themes of the framework, including “environment”, “foreground activity”, “stimulus noticed”, “reaction to stimulus”, “content examined”, “interaction with encountered information”, “value of experience”, “pre-encountering emotional state”, and “post-encountering emotional state”, were used to create a diary questionnaire for collecting IE incidents. The sub-themes were refined and organized into a coding scheme for the content analysis of the incidents collected. The diary study collected 255 valid IE incidents which were analyzed based on three phases, that is, pre-encountering, encountering, and post-encountering.Originality/valueThe value of this study consists in its methodological contributions. First, it makes creative use of secondary data accumulated in the literature and derives from the thematic analysis a general framework which people follow to describe their IE experiences. Second, it demonstrates the great potential of diaries for data collection in IE research through the successful application of the general description framework of IE experiences in a diary study. Third, the diary questionnaire created based on the framework provides sufficient guidance in eliciting complete and detailed IE incidents.

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Exploring Opportunities to Facilitate Serendipity in Search

Cited by 18 publications

References 16 publications

Serendipity in legal information seeking behavior

Serendipity in legal information seeking behavior

Three key affordances for serendipity

Toward a description framework of information encountering experiences

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