Pew Research Center has just published a survey about the American news consumer. It seems like many Americans (59%) get their daily news from multiple platforms combining online and offline resources.

“The internet is now the third most-popular news platform, behind local and national television news and ahead of national print newspapers, local print newspapers and radio.”

Personally I get all my daily news from the Internet through my mobile and my rss-reader. We subscribe to a (paper) newspaper, Weekendavisen. Weekendavisen have thorough articles about present topics. I very rarely watch the news on TV. I regularly use the ’send to friend’ feature on news sites or share it via Shareaholic in Firefox.

Whats really interesting in the survey is that 37% has contributed to the creating or spread of news fascilitated by social media. As noted by David Weinberger This breaks the rule some claim to be a fact, that 99% of the Internet users consume (or lurk as a non-flattering term sometimes used) and 1% produces.

This, I think, might have been a fact in the good ol’ newsgroup days. With the popularity of social media and the fact that almost every household has at least one computer, I think PEW’s results indicates that Internet users of today are much more participatory.

Another finding in the study was that a lot of people get news through email. I wonder if it is the same people who share news through email that also share through social media.

Interesting survey indeed

This is a video from Rolighetsteorin (Fun theory), which is about changing human behavior thorugh fun. Watch a stairway made like a piano - cool interface.

Take the stairs instead of the escalator!

I am attending the ESSIR Summer School in Padua this summer. I will be trying a bit of live blogging during the summer school. What I will be noting down, is my view on the presented topics - Using the presentations in my context/research.

First live blogging is about Introduction to Information Retrieval presented by C. J. ‘Keith’ van Rijsbergen. The topics in this presentation are What is IR? IR Models, Precision and Recal, Relevance feedback. Here I will focus on what Information retrieval is.

Keith presented this model of the fields scientific paradigms

Scientific paradigm

Theory

<->

Experiments

<->

Real Life

Top down, and Bottom up -Approach

My research is clearly the Bottom up approach. I start with real users, and real (as well as simulated) task, experiences and from there on I will try to develop theory.

What is IR?
Generally speaking IR is about retrieval of textual documents. As a former student of Peter Ingwersen I would like to add that interactive - the interaction between the user and the system also must be present. I would say that for me, there is no point of studying IR without studying the users.  But I can see that studying/investigating algorithms and IR-systems can be made without users. But at some point user studies must be made.

‘Retrieval systems count things’

Systems count words locally in a document/object, and then they count words globally/external from the document and violá.

- The strength of the field of IR is evaluation

How do we evaluate the invented IR-systems. Demonstrate that the systems work. Not just demonstrate the speed. Measuring what the IR system returns in connection with the user. This will come up!

Here are some highlights from Keith’s presentation

- 3 dimensional experimentation is when you add the users context - do that

- Controlled variables in experiments are test collections, topics, assesments (from Kal Järvelin)

- Use of words are problematic - words are to ambigius

- In real life - you don’t have relevance in advance

And my favorite from Swanson (1988):

- A document relevance depends on other seen documents - relevance is not indeendent

References
Swanson (1988). Historical note: Information retrieval and the future of an illusion. In: Journal of the American Society for Information Science. 39 (2). p. 92-98.

Data collection for my PhD project is over. Intriguing as it was, it was also hard, and a bit nerve wrecking ;-) Every day securing precious data, looking forward to the next days challenges. Bit of being part of a action movie.

I made use of a interlinked group of expert users of the folksonomy Delicious as participants in a multiple case study. This to investigate my research questions regarding users information seeking behavior, social navigation and connectivity in a folksonomy.
I recruited the participants using the chain referral method. Starting with one participant known to be an expert user, I asked if the participant knew other expert users that he thought would participate in the study. He referred me to two and then the chain went on to fifth link. It was amazing, the positive feedback my project got. Of 16 participants only one participant said no, and that after struggling long and hard with his work schedule.

The 15 participants conducted four search sessions, three triggered by simulated work task situations (see Borlund, 2003) and one search task they brought to the session. The participant’s actions were logged, and after the search sessions the participants were interviewed about their thoughts during the searches and were encuraged to contemplate their connectivity to other users in their network. The log served as stimuli in the interview, and the participants were asked to explain their information seeking behavior as well as their experience with Delicious.

So now I have what seems like very good interview data, log data and social network data to structure, code and comment. Currently I am transcribing interviews, and developing codes to structure it.

More of this later

References

Borlund, Pia (2003)  “The IIR evaluation model: a framework for evaluation of interactive information retrieval systems”Information Research, 8(3), paper no. 152 [Available at: http://informationr.net/ir/8-3/paper152.html]