Researching Serendipity in Digital Information Environments. Lori McCay-Peet

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      Copyright © 2018 by Morgan and Claypool

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

      Researching Serendipity in Digital Information Environments

      Lori McCay-Peet and Elaine G. Toms

       www.morganclaypool.com

      ISBN: 9781681730936 print

      ISBN: 9781681730943 ebook

      DOI: 10.2200/S00790ED1V01Y201707ICR059

      A Publication in the Morgan and Claypool Publishers series

       SYNTHESIS LECTURES ON INFORMATION CONCEPTS, RETRIEVAL, AND SERVICES, #59

      Series Editor: Gary Marchionini, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

      Series ISSN: 1947-945X Print 1947-9468 Electronic

       Researching Serendipity in Digital Information Environments

       Lori McCay-Peet

      Dalhousie University

       Elaine G. Toms

      The University of Sheffield

       SYNTHESIS LECTURES ON INFORMATION CONCEPTS, RETRIEVAL, AND SERVICES #59

       ABSTRACT

      Chance, luck, and good fortune are the usual go-to descriptors of serendipity, a phenomenon aptly often coupled with famous anecdotes of accidental discoveries in engineering and science in modern history such as penicillin, Teflon, and Post-it notes. Serendipity, however, is evident in many fields of research, in organizations, in everyday life—and there is more to it than luck implies. While the phenomenon is strongly associated with in-person interactions with people, places, and things, most attention of late has focused on its preservation and facilitation within digital information environments. Serendipity’s association with unexpected, positive user experiences and outcomes has spurred an interest in understanding both how current digital information environments support serendipity and how novel approaches may be developed to facilitate it. Research has sought to understand serendipity, how it is manifested in people’s personality traits and behaviors, how it may be facilitated in digital information environments such as mobile applications, and its impacts on an individual, an organizational, and a wider level. Because serendipity is expressed and understood in different ways in different contexts, multiple methods have been used to study the phenomenon and evaluate digital information environments that may support it. This volume brings together different disciplinary perspectives and examines the motivations for studying serendipity, the various ways in which serendipity has been approached in the research, methodological approaches to build theory, and how it may be facilitated. Finally, a roadmap for serendipity research is drawn by integrating key points from this volume to produce a framework for the examination of serendipity in digital information environments.

       KEYWORDS

      serendipity, digital information environments, user experience, human–centered information retrieval, human–computer interaction

       Contents

       Preface

       Acknowledgments

       1 Introduction

       1.1 Origins of Serendipity

       1.2 On Defining Serendipity

       1.3 How Serendipity Happens

       1.4 What Do We Mean by Serendipity in Digital Information Environments?

       1.5 Rest of the Book

       2 What Drives Serendipity Research?

       2.1 Physical vs. Digital

       2.2 Information Overload

       2.3 Filter Bubbles

       2.4 User Experience

       2.5 User Strategies

       2.6 Understanding the Phenomenon

       2.7 Summary

       3 Approaches to Serendipity

       3.1 Serendipity as a Process or Experience

       3.2 Serendipity as a Quality

       3.3 Summary