1,721,205 research outputs found

    Discovery Is Never By Chance: Designing for (Un)Serendipity

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    Serendipity has a long tradition in the history of science as having played a key role in many significant discoveries. Computer scientists, valuing the role of serendipity in discovery, have attempted to design systems that encourage serendipity. However, that research has focused primarily on only one aspect of serendipity: that of chance encounters. In reality, for serendipity to be valuable chance encounters must be synthesized into insight. In this paper we show, through a formal consideration of serendipity and analysis of how various systems have seized on attributes of interpreting serendipity, that there is a richer space for design to support serendipitous creativity, innovation and discovery than has been tapped to date. We discuss how ideas might be encoded to be shared or discovered by ‘association-hunting’ agents. We propose considering not only the inventor’s role in perceiving serendipity, but also how that inventor’s perception may be enhanced to increase the opportunity for serendipity. We explore the role of environment and how we can better enable serendipitous discoveries to find a home more readily and immediately

    From X-Rays to Silly Putty via Uranus: Serendipity and its Role in Web Search

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    The act of encountering information unexpectedly has long been identified as valuable, both as a joy in itself and as part of task-focused problem solving. There has been a concern that highly accurate search engines and targeted personalization may reduce opportunities for serendipity on the Web. We examine whether there is the potential for serendipitous encounters during Web search, and whether improving search relevance through personalization reduces this potential. By studying Web search query logs and the results people judge relevant and interesting, we find many of the queries people perform return interesting (potentially serendipitous) results that are not directly relevant. Rather than harming serendipity, personalization appears to identify interesting results in addition to relevant ones

    Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis

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    The present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed

    Blogging Together: An Examination of Group Blogs

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    This paper presents the first examination of the growing phenomenon of multi-author, or group blogs.  Using a large collection of blog posts gathered over an eight month period, we conducted some quantitative assessments.  Multi-author blogs were found to differ significantly from single-and-two author blogs on several quality metrics, including having longer posts on average and being ranked higher according to an in-link metric.  Visualization of patterns of posting revealed that individual authors often dominate the posts in multi-author blogs, and that in some cases tags are shared, but usually not extensively

    Variations on the Author

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    “Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship

    Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis

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    We provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis

    Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts

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    We conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more sophisticated methods

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    Modeling User Behavior and Attention in Search

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    Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2013In Web search, query and click log data are easy to collect but they fail to capture user behaviors that do not lead to clicks. As search engines reach the limits inherent in click data and are hungry for more data in a competitive environment, mining cursor movements, hovering, and scrolling becomes important. This dissertation investigates how remotely collecting rich user interaction data in the form of mouse cursor activity can help researchers understand fundamental human behavior and improve the design of search engines. Specifically, mining cursor activity can improve upon state-of-the-art methods for scoring and ranking search results, and estimating where users are looking without eye-tracking. Descriptive analyses of cursor movements show how users move their cursor when they search to provide signals of relevance and explain reasons for abandoning a search. User models can be used to infer visual attention on the page to identify what content users are looking at, as well as compute the relevance and attractiveness of search results to the user. This implicit feedback given to the search engine can then inform the layout and content presented on the pages, or improve the ranking of search results. This dissertation will demonstrate the following thesis: users' mouse cursor interactions can be collected efficiently on the Web, used to understand users' search behaviors, and can be useful in the design of Web search engines
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