Social discovery in an information abundant world: Designing to create capacity and seek solutions

Abstract

Abstract. The first generation of search tools provided remarkable capabilities to many researchers for finding specific information, navigating to desired websites or tracking down needed documents. A second generation of tools is helping researchers conduct exploratory search in situations where the goals are less clear, where complete coverage is necessary, and where proof of absence is required (patents, legal precedents, etc.). However, the third generation of tools turns search into social discovery, in which colleagues, informal groups, companies, non-profit organizations, professional societies, and international federations are motivated to find, filter, organize, annotate and summarize voluminous information resources. The Reader-to-Leader framework describes the usability and sociability design features needed to motivate readers, contributors, collaborators and leaders. The Social Discovery framework, proposed in this paper, suggests that effective design enables people to engage in dialogs over weeks and months to create capacity (in the manner described by the Reader-to-Leader framework), and become more effective solution seekers. Much work remains to be done to validate these social discovery frameworks and refine them to fit diverse contexts.

Website Navigation: An Exploratory Study of Three Navigation Tools for Simple Web Tasks

“…Tagging has been studied extensively in the past few years and is considered one of the successful discovery tools, where discovery involves the usage of social tools to find information (Shneiderman, 2011). Improvements for tagging media objects have been explored by recommending tags based on personalized and social context (Rae, Sigurbjornsson and Zwol, 2010).…”

Social discovery framework

“…The proposed Social Discovery Framework (Table 1) is oriented around information gathering that leads to breakthrough discoveries [9]. Biologists are collecting data by way of the Encyclopedia of Life (www.eol.org), while museum professionals are gathering annotations through the Steve Museum Project (www.steve.museum).…”

“…Biologists are collecting data by way of the Encyclopedia of Life (www.eol.org), while museum professionals are gathering annotations through the Steve Museum Project (www.steve.museum). These and thousands of other tagging, reviewing, data collecting projects (www.citizensciencealliance.org) are being joined by crowdsourcing efforts using Amazon's Mechanical Turk or volunteer associations [9]. The two aspects of creating capacity are those who initiate the requests and those who provide responses.…”

A comparative study of navigation using single vs. community driven tag clouds on websites

“…Tagging has been studied extensively in the past few years and is considered one of the successful ways to use social tools to find information (Shneiderman, 2011). Improvements for tagging media objects have been explored by recommending tags based on personalized and social context (Rae, Sigurbjornsson and Zwol, 2010).…”