Children and Information Access: Fostering a Sense of Belonging Maria Soledad Pera1,* , Katherine Landau Wright2 , Casey Kennington3 and Jerry Alan Fails3 1 Web Information Systems, TU Delft, The Netherlands 2 Dept. of Literacy, Language and Culture, Boise State University, USA 3 Dept. of Computer Science, Boise State University, USA Abstract In this vision paper, we spotlight children as often underserved users in the digital ecosystem. With online search as a use case, we discuss the need for a multi-perspective approach to designing interactive interfaces and technologies that can enable information access systems to better respond to children’s requirements while respecting the cultural and social norms impacting their upbringing. Keywords Children, Information Access, Culture, Inclusion, Information Discovery, Web Search 1. The Social Role of Search it is not surprising that the resources they are exposed to influence how they see the world. At the same time, Engines there is no “stereotypical child searcher”: each searcher is Search engines (SE) are a “powerful intermediary” [1] unique in their individual learning and the development between users and online resources. With power comes of their abilities, as well as their cultural background and the responsibility for what is presented to users as they social context. This begs the question of whether is pos- seek information. Researchers have looked into this mat- sible to personalize children’s interactions with SE to foster ter from different perspectives: from auditing retrieval their sense of belonging. and ranking algorithms to proposing interfaces and other technologies that empower users to curate the resources 2. One Culture Does Not Fit All they are exposed to [2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. The conversation is ongoing, yet, we note that on issues of representation, Consider the SE Result Pages (SERP) in Figure 1. A existing works primarily study interactions or propose child looking for holiday cookies will notice that all technologies focused on dimensions of interest to mature the top results are Christmas-themed (Fig. 1a). How- (and mostly English-speaking) searchers (e.g. news or ever, not all children celebrate Christmas; other holidays political viewpoints) [1, 7]. around this time of the year include Diwali, Hanukkah, We advocate for a greater examination of users im- and Kwanzaa. Adult searchers may reformulate their pacted by the power of SE, starting with children. For queries to include “non-christmas,” resulting in the top-2 these young searchers, SE are the portals to leisure and results being mostly culture-agnostic, but by the 3𝑟𝑑 , the educational resources [8]. As children develop, they be- sole holiday mentioned is Christmas (Fig 1b). Nonethe- come more aware of the reality surrounding them. Thus, less, children are known to struggle with query (re- )formulation [9], which might hinder their ability to find Joint Proceedings of the ACM IUI Workshops 2023, March 2023, Sydney, results that match their beliefs and expectations. This Australia * Corresponding author. issue is not restricted to Google as Bing yielded similar re- $ M.S.Pera@TUDelft.nl (M. S. Pera); sults. KizSearch, which is designed for children, retrieved katherinewright@boisestate.edu (K. L. Wright); Christmas-related cookie recipes for both queries. caseykennington@boisestate.edu (C. Kennington); Retrieved results are an artifact of the SE’s attempt jerryfails@boisestate.edu (J. A. Fails) to provide the most frequently useful results for most € https://solepera.github.io/ (M. S. Pera); https://www.linkedin.com/in/katherinelwright/ (K. L. Wright); people. But identifying “most people” requires an as- https://www.caseyreddkennington.com (C. Kennington); sumption of the norm, and excludes those who deviate https://www.boisestate.edu/coen-kidsteam-hci/jerryfails/ from that group [10]. The issue of exclusion goes beyond (J. A. Fails) religious traditions. While Christmas is widely celebrated  0000-0002-2008-9204 (M. S. Pera); 0000-0002-6782-3453 in many Latin American countries, gingerbread cookies (K. L. Wright); 0000-0001-6654-8966 (C. Kennington); 0000-0001-6139-1162 (J. A. Fails) on the SERP are not common. The concern here is not © 2023 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License simply that Christmas dominates the SERP. True, many Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). CEUR Workshop CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org) Proceedings http://ceur-ws.org ISSN 1613-0073 people celebrate Christmas and cookies are perhaps a (a) ‘holiday cookies’ (b) ‘holiday cookies non-christmas’ (c) ‘holiday cookies non-christmas’ Figure 1: Snapshot of SERP generated in response to sample search queries during December 2022. more integrated part of this celebration than other win- how interactive interfaces and technologies could also ter traditions. However, the absence of representation be adopted to improve other search modalities such as of other cultural heritages sends an implicit message of mobile devices and voice assistants. who the internet is for and, more importantly, who it Lessons learned emerging from this use case can also is not for. This also spotlights the missed opportunity impact the design of other information access tools, such of using search tools as a means to foster cross-cultural as recommender systems, so that they can explicitly miti- understanding [11]. gate stereotypes and address cultural and social aspects about children, in addition to promoting diverse repre- sentation and in turn fostering a sense of belonging. 3. The Quest for Interactive Personalization Acknowledgments With this work, we emphasize the need for SE to leverage Work partially funded by NSF Award #1763649. interactive interfaces and technologies to attain broader representation and better serve children. Starting for example with the use of clarifying questions [12] which References is already an alternative to disambiguating traditional users’ information needs and helping them navigate the [1] D. Trielli, N. Diakopoulos, Search as news curator: oftentimes overwhelming information space (Fig. 1c). 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