STAK: Serendipitous Tool for Augmenting Knowledge - Bridging gaps between digital and physical resources
1. Kim Martin, Brian Greenspan, and Anabel Quan-Haase
STAK
(SerendipitousTool for Augmenting Knowledge)
Bridging Gaps between Digital and Physical Resources
2. “serendipity” mentioned in !
all articles!
(JStor) !
Total: 6559
“serendipity” mentioned in !
LIS articles!
(JStor) !
Total: 403
Source: http://dfr.jstor.org/
3. “With a library it is easier to hope for serendipity than to look
for a precise answer.”
–Lemony Snicket
4. Overview
✤ The beginning!
✤ Serendipity research/models!
✤ User Study!
✤ Augmented Reality tools!
✤ Informed Serendipity!
✤ Theories of distraction!
✤ The prototype
6. From the literature
✤ How will digitization change the research process of humanities
scholars? (Weintraub 1980)!
!
✤ Majority of searching done online (Toms and O’Brien 2008)!
!
✤ Google Scholar most used by scholars (Kemman et al 2013)!
!
7. Research Questions
1. Why is the library the perfect setting for serendipitous discovery and
what makes this setting so conducive to the chance encounter?
!
!
2. How do researchers actually browse for information in a physical
library, and how do they experience libraries and serendipitous
discoveries?
!
!
3. How do we bridge the perceived gap between the physical and digital
resources, while at the same time providing users with key features and
affordances of both worlds?
10. “I find it dizzy because here you know, poor signage. I saw a ‘B’
(referring to call numbers) but I don't know where ‘A’ is. It
would be nice for ‘A’ catalogs are here, ‘B’ here ‘C’ here so I
don’t have to go…”
- Maureen
11. “I feel that if I’m looking up a topic and I go to the shelf for
video game studies, I’ll find books that I hadn’t seen in the
catalog, but in the general field; even if I lose track of a single
book,I’ll find another in the general area; this happens to me
constantly.”
– Clarissa
“typically
I
start
with
the
speci0ic
text
I've
come
across,
sometimes
looking
up
keywords
[kws].
Usually
I
will
0ind
one
book
I
know
i'm
looking
for,
then
check
that
section.
b/c
sometimes
books
don't
come
up
in
my
searches
for
whatever
reason”
– David
12. “I was in the library collecting books as I do, &!
one book was in a random section i've never been in before. I was kinda !
surprised that it was not where I expected it to be--one of those ones
buried way in a far-flung corner, and if you blink as you walk by you'll miss
it. Trying to find it, I walked past a section & a title caught my eye, so I
stopped, & was looking through it, and ended up finding a book that I
checked out because it was related to something I was looking for.”
–Bill
12
14. STAK will:
✤ Augment the physical collection with the cloud of digital data that
surround it!
✤ Preserve the affective experience of physical browsing by allowing for
the tactile and embodied experience with research materials. !
✤ Enhance the physical library with the metadata and extant library
organization system!
✤ Support users' recall through the spatial experience of information.!
✤ Use the physical library environment to encourage the kinds of
distractions and unexpected links that create serendipitous experiences
15. User Model
Research interests:!
!
Communication analysis of networked academics!
Social Networks!
Social media!
Actor-Network Theory!
Communication Technologies!
Facebook!
Instant messaging!
Latour!
Wellman!
!
Theories of media reception!
Reception theory!
Audience response!
Public sphere !
Media studies!
Theatre Audience!
Censorship!
Bakhtin!
Habermas!
!
Implementation of Computational Linguistics Lab!
Linguistics applications!
AI!
Computer Science!
Project management !
Data mining!
NLP!
Turing!
Markov!
!
36-year-old Professor of Communication!
16. “The title was in bold print, it was a large
book, I think that's why I noticed it,
because the book itself was a very vibrant
colour. . . . Often I notice the cover of the
book before the title itself, and just take it
from there. That's why it's funny that the 85
Million books like this, the re-covered
bland, grey or black books, those are the
ones I have a hard time finding because I
don't notice them right away.”!
!
!
- Bill!
17. Research Goal:
To create, not an algorithm for serendipity, but the
conditions in which serendipity is likely to occur
22. FutureWork
✤ Publish paper on work to date!
!
✤ Perfect dynamic user model management system!
!
✤ Design, implement and test several interface prototypes!
23. References
✤ Kemman, Max, Martijn Kleppe, and Stef Scagliola. 2013. “Just Google It Digital
Research Practices of Humanities Scholars.” Cornell Digital Libraries: 1–17.!
✤ Mould, David. 2014. “Book Wanderer” Written in Processing 2.0. July 9, 2014. !
✤ Toms, Elaine G., and Heather L. O’Brien. 2008. “Understanding the Information and
Communication Technology Needs of the E-Humanist.” Journal of Documentation 64
(1): 102–130. doi:10.1108/00220410810844178.!
✤ Weintraub, Karl J. 1980. “The Humanistic Scholar and the Library.” The Library
Quarterly 50 (1): 22–39.
