I’ve been working with Ed Chi at PARC to understand search in enterprises, and specifically how/where social search may help. Our approach has been to collect critical-incident style survey responses from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. The first survey, asking corporate/enterprise users about the last time they searched for digital information on their computers, has returned 100 good responses (and only 8 gibberish responses). A preliminary analysis of this data revealed that: 1) most people did not report having any problems with their search process (we were hoping for a few instances of failure); and 2) a surprising number of people interacted with colleagues and friends prior to the search act itself. Based on this, we decided to submit two additional surveys querying users to report specific instances of 1) search failures and 2) social interactions during search. These follow-up surveys have also received a decent response rate: failures = 45 good replies, 1 bad; social = 18 good replies, 1 bad.

The last two weeks has been filled with scouring the previous literature for work on collaborative search and information foraging and sensemaking. I’ve been trying to incorporate our findings with models others have proposed (Wilson ’81, Russell et al. ’93, Twidale et al. ’97, Pirolli & Card ’05, Morris ’08, etc.) to get an idea of how/where/when/why social interactions may improve the search and sensemaking process. Ed and I are going to try to write this up as a 4-page note for the Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) conference (due Apr 18).

In addition, I’ve been working with my three wonderful (UCSD–second year project) research participants to finish up data collection. I’ve been asking participants to capture via screencasts (video recordings) portions of their online activity, especially as they interact with online social media tools to communicate and share information with others. Video recordings have included online and desktop (local) activities related to both personal and work pursuits. I expect to finish collecting recording files from subjects by the end of next week (first week in April).

As the files have been rolling in, Tim, Amanda, and I have been transcribing the activities/events observed in each subject’s videos. Nearly all the files have been coded once, and over half have been put through a “second read” to double-check, correct any errors, and add additional comments.

To better understand and interpret the behavior observed in the screencasts, I am also interviewing participants about their behaviors, interests, goals, etc. So far I’ve conducted one interview (each) with two of the participants, where I asked them to “walk me through” one or two of their video files, providing me essentially with a narrative overview about why they did (or did not do!) certain things. I also asked about their interaction with other members of the group, but I expect to probe more about this in future interviews.

One note about the interview process: I considered using an audio recorder that Ed Hutchins lent me, but that would have meant missing out on any desktop interactions, behaviors, searches, etc. that participants might perform as they walked me through their video files. Instead, I decided to use ScreenFlow to capture all of our desktop activity plus an audio track. (In fact, ScreenFlow is the screencast software that each of the participants has been using.) The biggest drawback to ScreenFlow is that the original files are in their native *.screencast format and exporting to *.mov takes quite a long time. However, the video and audio quality is excellent, and the benefit of having one file containing both video and audio tracks totally outweighs the export-time setback!

At this point, I plan to focus on getting out the CSCW note and wrap up 2nd year project data collection. I’ll be out of (San Diego) town for the first two weeks in April (going to CHI’08 in Florence!), but when I return, I will dive deep into 2nd year project data analysis.

Tim, Amanda, and I are transcribing and coding each video file, and we are making sure each file gets reviewed by at least two of us. At this point, we are about half-way through coding the files we’ve collected.

I’ve also been preparing some interview questions for participants 01 and 02. I hope to conduct a preliminary interview with them early next week.

Also last week: I created, piloted, and revised two surveys for the social search project at PARC. We’re trying to collect 50–100 responses (initially) from Mechanical Turk. So far we have 40 for the searching survey and 5 for the organization/tagging survey. See this post for more details.

Finally, Stu Card and I prepared our CHI madness slides (and 30-second spiel). If you’re going to CHI2008, come to our talk! We’re in the “Help Me Search” session on Wednesday, Apr 9, from 9:00–10:30AM.

Tim, Amanda, and I have been coding the videos we’ve collected so far. Each of us will review each video verify the transcripts of each video and collectively begin to compose interview questions. At this point, I will most likely conduct two interviews per participant; for the “local” participants, I may additionally try to follow them for a day (in person) to get a better sense of how their recorded behaviors fit into their daily tasks and activities.

For my second year project, I met with Tim and Amanda (undergrads) to begin coding the few video files I’ve received. I reviewed the files myself and am preparing a short talk for lab meeting where I will present some interesting clips for discussion. I’m hoping the other three subjects in the study can begin recordings this week. I will be in touch with them, again, shortly. 

During the past 2 weeks at PARC, I wrote and piloted an interview on information sharing practices in the workplace. From it, I created a survey that I posted on Mechanical Turk, where I’ve received 10 responses from unnamed entities each of whom I paid $0.25 for their response. I’m currently evaluating the quality of the responses and deciding if we should tweak the survey further before opening it up to hundreds of people.

I’ve also got the subjects for my second year project lined up. There are 4. I am still waiting to receive consent forms from two of them. One has already begun recording files for me. The rest will begin sometime next week.

This is a short update this time. But better short than nothing!

The second year project class mostly questioned the value of this data to researchers and designers. I said that my goal was to explore new and interesting combinations of social web technologies and usagepatterns (implicit information sharing, interactions with others, etc.), rather than evaluating how the general population uses these tools today. Consequently, I will collect data from early adopters, or “lead–users”—individuals who have worked out methods and stable patterns of using such systems beneficially in their daily lives.Early adopters are the first users of new Web tools. As such, they can provide a critical perspective on the technology state space. Lead–users may also be the developers of new technology; understanding their usage and behaviors patterns may inform us of the evolution of technology. In fact, by studying their activities, our research may additionally influence technology development. Finally, as Web technologies and access to the Internet become more pervasive, the tools and behaviors observed in early adopters today may eventually become widespread in the general population. (Does that address the question? Perhaps somewhat..and perhaps it still needs tobe developed more thoroughly?)

I have also begun coordinating my research “team” (including 4 undergraduate assistants). Their first task involves performing a pilot test of my data collection procedures. I gave them directions for capturing some of their online activity along with a few “deadlines.” The biggest problem I see for data collection at the moment involves uploading large data files to a shared server for the research team to access. I’ve looked into several online services that allow data storage and sharing: civil netizen seems the most promising at this point, although Jim may set up an FTP server for me. The undergraduates and I are planning to test the recording software and upload procedures this coming week. Subsequently, we will review the (pilot) data together and discuss technical and/or research issuesthat may have arisen. From this, I hope some of the undergrads will begin brainstorming interview questions, while others may begin reviewing the relevant literature.

I am back at PARC for the next two weeks, where I will focus my time on the enterprise tagging research project. However, in this time, I also plan to contact (and attempt to recruit) several participants for the UCSD study.

However, I have also been busy applying for funding and fellowships. I submitted an application for travel funds from the ACM group on Women in Computing and from the UCSD Social Science Dean’s fund. I also applied for a 3-year fellowship from AT&T Labs, and submitted an application for a summer internship at PARC (again). Hope all this work will pay off somehow!

Per Leif’s advice, I’m going to keep these updates shorter. Although today I decided to attach the abstract for my second year project. Any comments/suggestions/advice is greatly appreciated! (Or you can stop reading now.)

I have begun to explore the behaviors, goals, and motivations of early adopters, or power users, as they engage with Web services and public communities online. A majority of Web systems used by these early adopters provide light-weight mechanisms for creating and saving new Web content, essentially providing an implicit means of sharing. In fact, several users reported that they intended to share information with small groups of known friends and even with unknown extended communities, even though sharing occurred as a side–effect of their primary actions. Furthermore, some informants indicated that their continued involvement served as a means of “self–endorsement,” to maintain relationships and accrue social capital. Regardless of the actual user motivations, these online behaviors have the potential of creating repositories of knowledge that would benefit information discovery and learning by others. However, this preliminary work has only considered the perspective of the individual who is sharing information. Therefore, I would like to extend data collection to look at the behaviors and interactions among a small group of online friends (4–5 individuals), to observe the cycle of information as it is shared and received by different members of the group. I will ask the entire group to video record their online activities for the same 2–week period, and I will subsequently interview participants about their behavior and the behaviors and perceived influence of others in the group. While my main purpose is to document the diffuse, yet hopefully overlapping, activities of a group of individuals as they engage with new Web systems and with each other, I also hope to explore the social and cognitive motivations for their actions and sharing behaviors.