The document summarizes research into optimizing the DIVE+ exploratory search tool for the needs of media professionals. It discusses findings from workshops with media professionals and other users that identified issues with transparency in DIVE+ that limit its usefulness. The key findings were that media professionals require search tools that provide transparent information about search results and collections, and allow tailoring searches to their specific needs and time constraints. Recommendations included adding more collection metadata, clarifying relationships between search results, and including more filtering options to improve DIVE+'s support for exploratory search by media professionals.

1. Optimizing Explorative Search for the Needs of Media
Professionals: The DIVE+ Use Case
Thesis Defense Justin Verhulst

2. To discuss
● What’s it all about?
● Why bother?
● DIVE+ features: events, narratives, serendipity
● How did we study it?
● Findings
● Wrap-up
Optimizing Explorative Search for the Needs of Media
Professionals: The DIVE+ Use Case

3. Explorative search
Explorative search
▪ Helps when you don’t know
what to search for
▪ Helps you understand &
deepen in a topic
▪ Serendipity driven
▪ Focused on engagement

4. Media professionals
The media professional
▪ Audiovisual domain
▪ focus on organizing and collecting audiovisual
material for the purpose of story generation
▪ Domains: broadcasting, archives
▪ Media professionals have to do a lot of research
and thus engage in exploratory search practices

5. DIVE+
▪ Explorative search browser based on
events-enriched LOD
▪ Heritage objects and collections
▪ Interpreting, understanding & sense-making
▪ Exploration & discovery

6. So… why this research?
Optimizing Explorative Search for the Needs of Media
Professionals: The DIVE+ Use Case
▪ Improve our understanding of the exploratory search practices
of media professionals
▪ Is DIVE+ is useful for media professionals, and how do they
differ from other users ?
▪ Improving the DIVE+ interface and adapt it to the needs of
media professionals

7. Research questions
▪ What are the digital search and exploration
practices of media professionals?
▪ To what extent are the exploratory search
requirements of media professionals supported
by the narratives, events and serendipity in
DIVE?

8. Events
▪ Historical events and related objects form the basis of DIVE+
▪ Simple Event Model (SEM) is used to model events and their
interrelations
▪ The user can create historically meaningful narratives in
DIVE+ by connecting different events to each other.

9. Narratives
▪ A narrative can be seen as a sequence of objects and events,
which together form one angle or ‘story’ of the (sub)set of the
cultural heritage collection
▪ A narrative is formed by making connections between
historical objects or events
▪ Narratives in DIVE+ allow the user to place cultural heritage
into context and to understand it better.

10. Serendipity
▪ Serendipity is the discovery of useful information that was not
initially sought for by the user
▪ DIVE+ aims to support serendipitous information retrieval
▪ In DIVE+, serendipity is stimulated through events and
narratives
▪ By visually linking events and objects, the exploring user can
stumble upon unexpected, but useful items.

12. related
entities
explore
event

13. narrative

14. DIVE+ helps users to interpret information (cultural heritage) better
through three core features: events, narratives, and serendipity.

15. How did we study it?
CreateSalon Workshop MediaNow workshop DIVE+ testing I DIVE+ testing II
Date & time 9-5-2017
15:00 - 16:00
24-5-2017
10:10 - 12:00
May - June 2017 June 2017
Target group Humanities scholars
and students
Media professionals (digital)
humanities
students
Computer science
students
Participants
background
Art, history, literature,
media studies
Broadcasting organisations,
libraries, archives
Students Students
Setting Collective DIVE+ test
session at UvA
Collective DIVE+ test session
at Sound and Vision
Testing DIVE+ at
home
Testing DIVE+ at
home
Size of group 18 11 16 22

16. MediaNow Workshop with media
professionals
CreateSalon workshop with
Humanities scholars and students

17. How did we study it?
Workshop media professionals
▪ 11 participants
▪ Various backgrounds: broadcasting organisations and
libraries/archives
A variety of tools:
▪ Poster session
▪ Usability testing of DIVE+ (simulated work task & think aloud protocol)
▪ Questionnaire
▪ Focus group
▪ Log analysis

18. Lot of data!Lots of data...

19. What did we find?
▪ Search requirements of MPs are influenced by
work-related constraints
▪ Limited DIVE+ user experience due to a lack of
transparency and limited user control

20. Findings: work-related
constraints
▪ Limited time and budget for searching
▪ Type of material sought depends on target audience of a
program
▪ Need for transparency during
search
“What we really have is the
time restriction…”
“So budget, maybe the first one
is time, how much time do I have…”

21. Findings: work-related
constraints
▪ Limited time and budget
for searching
▪ Type of material sought depends
on target audience of a program
▪ Need for transparency
during search
“I work at the NOS, when you search for the Youth News, you are
looking for the cliché explanation story, so you are looking for facts
and cliches, while for the Evening News, you are looking for an
original angle”

22. Findings: work-related
constraints
▪ Limited time and budget for searching
▪ Type of material sought depends
on target audience of a program
▪ Need for transparency during search
“the first thing you hear: don’t trust anyone, nothing.
Everyone has a hidden agenda. And you have to find
it. A database also has a hidden agenda, so to speak.
An algorithm, how does that work here. Can I trust it.
[..] We want to see it with our own eyes”

23. Findings: DIVE+ user
experience
Media professionals long for transparency during search: results and their
interrelations should be clear and verifiable
In DIVE+, more transparency is needed regarding:
▪ Collections
▪ Related entities
▪ Entity labels
▪ Object/entity information
“You say making it easy, is actually showing how it is composed, the results,
then you make it easy. Because then you are able to get insights, then you
can trace it back”

24. Why related?
Minimal metadata:
descriptions & collection
Why these labels?

25. Findings: DIVE+ user
experience
Adapt results based on background & interests of media
professional
▪ Filtering options: collection & media type
▪ Adapt exploration path to include only ‘relevant’ items
“Pictures don’t interest me now, I want images, moving images”
“It would be useful if DIVE would not save everything by itself, but
only on the request of the user”

26. More fine-grained filtering needed
Include only
‘relevant’ items in
the exploration path

27. Findings: wrap-up (media
professionals)
Work-related constraints
▪ Time and budget
▪ Target audience of a program
▪ Need for transparency
Limited DIVE+ user experience
▪ lack of transparency
▪ limited user control

28. What about the other user
groups?
Mostly similar results: DIVE+ has some issues which limits the
users to understand what, and why, results are presented to them
Some notable differences
▪ Media professionals are most critical about the event
characteristics
▪ Media professionals are most critical concerning suggested
narratives
▪ Humanities scholars see the potential, where media
professionals are more critical

29. How does this relate to
events, narratives, and
serendipity?
Events:
▪ How events and their interrelations are presented to the users not clear, because
of the transparency issues. This has negative consequences for the usefulness of
narratives and events
Narratives:
▪ Media professionals most critical concerning suggested narratives.
▪ Potential of exploration path and narratives is noted, e.g. sharing stories/search
path with colleagues
Serendipity:
▪ Limited, due to the difficulty to assess the relevance of search results

30. Requirements
Search requirements of media professionals:
▪ Tools should be time-efficient to use
▪ There should be enough information available that describes
collections and objects
▪ The information should be transparent and verifiable
▪ There should be options to tailor the search to the specific
(need of the) media professional
How should we go about to address these requirements?

31. Recommendations
Requirement Interface recommendation Intended outcome
There should be enough
information available that
describes collections and objects
Provide details about the collections
in DIVE+ on the start- and result
page; add metadata to better
describe objects
Media professional is better able to
make sense of and understand the
objects and entities.
The information should be
transparent and verifiable
Explicate relationships between
objects on the result page
Trust in DIVE+ will increase and a
media professional is better able to
rely on the correctness of results
There should be options to tailor
the search to the specific (need of
the) media professional
Add more fine-grained sorting
options (based on media type and
collection)
Personal search needs of the media
professional are better addressed
Tools should be time-efficient to
use
Increase overall usability of DIVE+ Media professional saves time and
potentially could use DIVE+ in
actual work setting

32. Examples of interface
improvements
Transparency about the
collections in DIVE+
Filtering options regarding
collections & media type

33. Wrap-up
Currently, the narratives, events, and serendipity in DIVE+ are of limited
support to the exploratory search requirements of media professionals.
Though users can see the potential of the various features, practical use is
limited.
The biggest and most pressing challenge right now, especially for media
professionals, is to increase transparency of the tool, so that users are better
able to understand what is presented to them, and why it is presented to
them

34. Method limitations
The use of methods influenced the research to some extent:
▪ Relatively short testing time, which made it difficult for the participants to assess
DIVE+ in-depth. Longer testing time, e.g. through longitudinal research, would be
a solution
▪ Slightly different set-up of the user studies, which diminished their
comparability. Better aligning the tools (e.g. asking the same questions in
different workshops) would be a solution
We tried to minimize these issues by using multiple tools and methods that supported
each other. The data could in this way be cross-checked, which led to reliable and valid
findings and conclusions.

35. Thank you for your
attention!