Workplan of Wilko van Hoek (GESIS)

The research topic for my PhD thesis is Visual Interactive Search Histories (VISHs) to support the revisitation of relevant
literature in a Digital Library (DL). These histories are supposed to support users during the information seeking process.
Therefore the users’ activities are in a DL are logged and made eyplorable visually and interactively. The main issue regarding VISHs is the fast growing amount of information that is generated by logging all user activities. The question here is: how can we support users with a VISH that allows a good overview without even when a history has grown over a long time period?
To find an answer to this question I want to visit the e-Humanities group and the e-Research group at DANS and take
advantage of their experiences with visualizing large data sets using knowledge maps. In detail I would want to discuss:

• What kinds of knowledge maps would suffice as a Search History Visualization?
• In which way can suitable knowledge maps be made interactive to allow the user to revisit information?
• As Search Histories are generated by users and their interaction with a system, they imply individual metadata (e.g. full text downloaded, opened in a new tab, visited more than 20 seconds). How can this additional metadata be used to aid the support the user’s interaction with a knowledge map.

During the stay I am planning to meet with researchers from both institutes (e-Research and e-Humanities) and with Renaud Lambiotte visiting the eHg at the same time.  Additionally I plan to attend the Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval (BIR) Workshop at ECIR 2014 (taking place in Amsterdam during the stay), as well as meeting with researches of Maarten de Rijke’s Information and Language Processing Systems group at the UvA in the context of the ECIR 2014.

Host: Andrea Scharnhorst DANS, eHg