User:Gusandrews/SearchProject/SearchStudyMethods

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[edit] 10/15/07, DiMartino and Zoe, 1996

To get history, used a 16-question check mark survey

Their dataset was 143 Baruch students who made an appt to use Lexis-Nexus (mind you this was in 1996 when it was a newish thing to them and to librarians both I think)

They were instructed on the basic mechanics of the system (Booleans, proximity searching, refining search, truncation, wildcards, date range, etc)

Allowed users to make own searches -- so much for their statistics?

[edit] 10/13/07, Case 2002

A lot of the literature seems to ask participants "Tell me about a past time you needed information." Varenne, I'm imagining, will reject this approach.

[edit] 10-8-07 comments by Varenne on ethnographic practice

(in answer to an e-mail message)

Do not "meditate on them for a few weeks in hopes that good practice will descend from the heavens and enlighten me," do something, practically: write fieldnotes anytime people talk to you about searching or everytime you watch someone searching, at home, at work, at play, on the plane...

  • There is not going to be one "natural setting." You will have an always renewed and open set of cultural settings, some more useful for your purposes than others. The first order of business is finding them, and the first order of business on this task is starting a list or settings and noting their apparent interactional properties (who? when? what?).
  • talking aloud may not be an "unnatural" practice to the extent that one can imagine that people, sometime, search in the presence of others along with others and get involved in discussions about all the issues (what key words to use, in what order, what links to follow, etc.). I have experienced such settings. And there are the times when people talk about their earlier searches, and get instructed about what to do next.
  • a "narrative history" will be interested for what it may tell you about the ways people tell stories. Not uninteresting but maybe not for what you want to do. In the phrase "how they learned to search" does "they" refer to a singular person? You might consider unfocused focus groups to find out what various kinds of groupings establish as the narrative. And then perhaps interviews about that to get people to tell you what was silenced in the group.

In other words, look to constructing/experiencing immortal social facts within social facts. Watch the traffic flow down the not-so virtual highway...


[edit] 10/5/07 Methods brainstorm, channeling Garfinkel

Garfinkel emphasizes the importance of seeing the social only as arising from concrete practice.

  • If search engine developers and SEOs are "experts" at what they do, it seems only fair that the user group I choose should also be a group of "experts," perhaps of a conflicting form of expertise.
    • What conflicts with experts in algorithms/information retrieval and marketing/optimization?
      • How about Christians?
        • They're experts in faith, a discourse against which science has often defined itself, and which sometimes decries "mammon" as evil.
        • Forms of judging "useful" pages in Christianity should thus be very distinct from the other parties' forms of judging useful pages, unlike judgment differences between, say, developers and teachers. (Do I want that difference?)
        • In this case "evolution" would be a good topic to look at. (Someone else had people looking up evolution. Who was that? One of the first things I read, I think.)
  • Reciprocal teaching?
    • Programmers teach pastors how to search; pastors teach programmers how to search?
  • One concern, according to Marchionini, is determining what kind of information search to look at.
    • "Facts"?
    • "Ideas"?
    • "Knowledge accretion"?
      • Religion likely falls in this category
  • How about using Garfinkel's idea of "breaching" or "bracketing"?
    • Try searchers on a range of different kinds of search engines, using the differences to elicit users' expectations for what "doing a search engine" means
    • Present searchers with normal and "broken" search engines
      • Not sure what that would mean. Search engines which do really unexpected things. How about a search engine which looks like Google but:
        • pops up Google Scholar results
        • opens a voice communication channel
        • pops up a library catalog or Amazon
        • limits results to a given website or domain (.gov, .org)
  • Have searchers do pile sorts of results from specific Google searches
    • how do they categorize what they've found as belonging to different discourses?

[edit] 9-24-07 suggestions from Tween info-seeking study

What they said might have filled the gaps in their focus-group method:

  • "Journaling or diaries: Collecting information on a regular basis through prompts would condition reflective behavior in participants and provide insights that may not be recorded in interviews due to limitations of time, memory, and the social roles of the researchers.
  • Information tools: Devices that provide the researchers with timely records of information seeking and use (logs or transaction artifacts) could be used to triangulate self reports and gain additional insights.
  • Experiential sampling: Surveys or question prompts based on time or location could further enhance knowledge of life “as it happens,” providing an additional dimension to researchers’ understanding of information behavior and facilitating an accurate and timely affective dimension.
  • Creative opportunities: Tweens responded strongly and positively to the opportunity to construct information products. Such artifacts and their development over time would give unique insights to the dialogic nature of constructing information use and meaning." (p 325)
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