=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1338/paper6
|storemode=property
|title=Just Looking Around: Supporting Casual Users Initial Encounters with Digital Cultural Heritage
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1338/paper_6.pdf
|volume=Vol-1338
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/ecir/WalshH15
}}
==Just Looking Around: Supporting Casual Users Initial Encounters with Digital Cultural Heritage==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1338/paper_6.pdf
Just looking around: Supporting casual users initial
encounters with Digital Cultural Heritage
David Walsh Mark M. Hall
Department of Computing Department of Computing
Edge Hill University Edge Hill University
St Helens Road St Helens Road
Ormskirk, L39 4QP Ormskirk, L39 4QP
United Kingdom United Kingdom
walshd@edgehill.ac.uk mark.hall@edgehill.ac.uk
ABSTRACT in storage rather than on display. To address this limitation
Cultural Heritage institutions have developed numerous ways CH institutions have been engaged in a massive digitisation
of supporting visitors who have simply wandered in through process, making large parts of their holdings available to the
the front door. However, for their digital collections, the CH public on their websites.
institutions mostly provide a simple search-box, which sup- Access to these collections is primarily provided through
ports the expert user, but which does not support the casual the search box. This works very well for expert users who
user who has just stumbled across the collection. These ca- know exactly what they want and which keywords they need
sual users frequently have no goal or topic in mind, but just to use to find what they are looking for [25]. However, CH
want to have a look around what is available in the collec- institutions also have to support the casual user who has just
tion. For these users the blank search-box presents a signif- stumbled across their collection in the same way that they
icant obstacle, as without a goal or topic it is very difficult would wander into the CH institution’s physical space. For
to formulate an appropriate query. In this paper we pro- these casual users, who have no specific goal in mind when
pose extending current exploratory search and information they come to the collection, the blank search-box presents
seeking models to support the initial interaction between the an almost insurmountable problem [30]. To access anything
casual user and the collection. in the collection, they are required to know at least one
keyword and these users are not provided with any alter-
native way to find what might be available and develop an
Keywords overview of the collection [15, 23, 14]. This is illustrated by
information seeking, information retrieval, casual user, ex- the following quote from a casual user of such a collection:
ploration
So what use are the digital libraries, if all they
do is put digitally unusable information on the
1. INTRODUCTION web. [5]
Cultural Heritage (CH) institutions such as museums and
galleries are accustomed to dealing with visitors who arrive There is thus a clear need to support these casual users
at their doors with no knowledge of what they could see or in their use of the collection. However, in the information
even what they would like to see. At the moment of ar- seeking (IS) and information retrieval (IR) domains, the fo-
rival the only goal these visitors have is spending some time cus has always been on users with a more or less clearly
in the museum or gallery. CH institutions have developed defined goal, as the lack of goal breaks the fundamental as-
a number of successful strategies for supporting these visi- sumptions in all current IS and IR models [12, 31]. Much
tors by providing them with floor plans, fliers, guide-books, work has been done on supporting exploration and discovery
audio-guides, and guided tours. when the user has at least a very vague goal [13, 17, 7], but
The major limitation that CH institutions face is that there remains a gap in our understanding around that first,
the physical space available for displaying the institution’s casual interaction between the user and the collection.
artefacts and the time required to curate the various intro-
ductory guides severely limit the number of artefacts that
can be shown to visitors, with the majority of artefacts held
2. BACKGROUND
Opening the CH institutions’ archives to the world through
digitisation makes them available to a much wider audience
than just the museum curators and CH researchers [15].
With this expanded audience comes the requirement of sup-
porting users outside the core group of experts, who have
previously explored the CH institutions archives, to include
Copyright c 2015 for the individual papers by the papers’ authors. Copy- the casual user [9, 27]. This presents a problem to current
ing permitted for private and academic purposes. This volume is published information retrieval models and techniques, as these are
and copyrighted by its editors.
ECIR Supporting Complex Search Task Workshop ’15 Vienna, Austria generally built around the concept that the user has some
Published on CEUR-WS: http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1338/. kind of goal, however vague, in mind.
The reasons users turn to digital information systems cover the user is interested in. Clustering and visualization ap-
the whole spectrum from (re-)locating a piece of information proaches can deal with the amount of data, but the resulting
they know exists to exploring an unknown topic to develop visualizations tend to suffer from information overload and
an understanding [6]. These interactions with digital infor- do not provide a usable overview over the large collections.
mation systems can roughly be classified as known-item or Similarly, faceted interfaces can process the amount of data
known-topic searches, where the user knows what they are available, but DCH collections are very heterogeneous [15]
looking for and what they expect to see, and exploratory and showing the most frequent 20 or 30 keywords does not
search interactions, where the goal is to explore, learn, in- give the user an overview and access to more than a very
terpret, synthesize, and understand [18, 28, 30]. small fraction of the total content.
The traditional IR model describes a simple loop consist- More importantly, however, is that all these theories and
ing of problem identification, query formulation, and result interfaces start with the assumption that the user has at
evaluation [25], which successfully supports the known-item least a very vague goal in mind. They do not model or
and known-topic search tasks [29]. To support the more support the completely undirected casual user.
open-ended exploration interactions, this basic model has
been expanded to create exploratory search models [18, 20],
which have much wider scope, complexity, and duration [19, 3. SUPPORTING THE CASUAL USER
3, 28].
To support the casual user in their initial interaction with
These models all treat the search process as if it is com-
the collection, the major change we propose is to let go of
pleted in a single session. However, the process of satisfying
the concept of the “information need” as the reason for in-
an information need will often extend over multiple search
teracting with an information system. The casual user has
sessions as the users slowly develop and refine their precise
a motivation for coming to the CH institution’s site, but
understanding of what they are looking for. A number of
this it not necessarily a need for information, they might
models of this extended process have been created to de-
just want to procrastinate . The focus for supporting the
scribe this information seeking journey [16, 26]. These mod-
casual user has to shift from supporting them in exploring
els all describe a process in which the user starts with a
and finding what they are looking for to supporting them in
very vague notion of what they are looking for and what the
understanding what is available in the collection and where
journey’s end-point will be. Then, as the user interacts with
they might start browsing.
the search system, they develop a clearer understanding of
We envision a number of different interfaces that could
their information need and their searches become evermore
enable such access. One approach would be to generate tex-
focused until they develop the final queries that satisfy their
tual summaries that describe the type of content available
information need.
from the collection. Such an approach would need to analyse
The final phases of the information seeking journey are
the individual items meta-data using an algorithm such as
generally well supported by the traditional search model
LDA [4], then combine that with a textual resource such as
and interfaces. For the earlier, more open-ended stages,
Wikipedia to generalise the topics, and finally generate tex-
a number of exploratory interfaces have been developed.
tual descriptions such as “The collection contains historical
Hierarchical systems [10] were intended to help organize
artefacts from ancient Egypt, space exploration, horology,
large sets of documents into groups or categories [8] en-
and a modern collection of oceanographic specimens.” The
abling searchers to perform more sophisticated browsing tac-
user could then click on any of the topics to get a summary
tics such as traversing and exploring nearest neighbour cat-
of the content in the selected area of the collection, enabling
egories [2, 30]. Clustering approaches [7] group together
them to freely explore.
related documents to give the user an overview over the
An alternative would be to use the topic structure to gen-
“topics” in their search results. Faceted classification [24,
erate an exploratory semantic map, that the users can inter-
18, 13, 21] generates a list of the most frequent keywords
act with and explore like they would a physical map. An-
for the collection (or search result) and shows these to the
other approach could be to look at developing an automatic
user. The user can then explore the collection by clicking
measure for the “interestingness” of items in the collection.
on the keywords, rather than having to type them into the
This could then be used to sample items from the collection
search box. Tag-clouds provide a similar visualization of the
to show the casual user the “highlights” of the collection.
most frequent keywords. Socially curated systems [22, 11,
The investigation of potential interfaces will have to be
1] allow users to curate their own mini-exhibitions and then
accompanied by a series of user studies that investigate how
share these with other users, providing the new and casual
casual users develop a topic they are interested in, when
user with a starting point for exploring the collection.
confronted with a new collection. This will enable us to
These approaches all suffer from a number of technical
extend the existing models for exploratory search and infor-
limitations, primarily around the difficulty of scaling to the
mation seeking by providing a more detailed understanding
massive amount of information that is available in modern
of the initial phase in which the user develops their informa-
Digital Cultural Heritage collections. The manual processes
tion need. This extension will enable information systems
that create hierarchical systems cannot deal with the mil-
to support the complete information journey, from the de-
lions of items that exist in modern big-data DCH collections
velopment of the information need to its final fulfilment.
and that need to be classified. Socially curated systems suf-
Finally, while in DCH this issue is particularly prevalent,
fer from the same lack-of-manpower issue and additionally
understanding the casual user who has no immediate need
to provide a comprehensive overview over a collection, they
could also have significant impact in the area of E-commerce.
would require so many mini-exhibitions that they simply
E-commerce is a major growth area, but currently does not
replace the problem of finding an item that the user is inter-
support browsing the available things in the same way that
ested in with the problem of finding a mini-exhibition that
you can browse through a shop.
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