Workplan of Dagmar Kern (GESIS)

My current research focuses on user interface engineering in the domain of interactive information seeking. I’m especially
interesting in using a user-centered design approach for developing new interactive concepts for the information seeking
process and how to evaluate new concepts in this context. So far, digital libraries make limited use of visual presentation of
search results. Users still have to scroll through long lists to explore their field of interest. The usage of knowledge maps to
support an explorative search approach is very promising but still not substantial evaluated. My plan for the one week STSM visit at the eHumanities Group and the eResearch group DANS is to discuss and learn from their experiences with the usage of knowledge maps for the online archiving system EASY. In particular I hope to get input to the following open research
issues:

• How are knowledge maps able to support information seeking processes?
• What evaluation techniques are appropriate to evaluate knowledge maps in the context of information seeking?
• What has to be changed so that knowledge maps support users in a usable and helpful manner in their information seeking
• process?
• How would a user-centered design process look like in this context?

The plan for the week envisages visits at DANS and eHumanities groups, meetings with researchers from both institutions and with Renaud Lambiotte and attending the Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval (BIR) Workshop at ECIR 2014. The stay will also be used to meet with researchers of Maarten de Rijke’s Information and Language Processing Systems group at the UvA in the context of the ECIR ongoing in Amsterdam in this week.

Host: Andrea Scharnhorst, DANS