Developing organized information displays for voluminous works: a study of user clustering behavior

Abstract

This paper investigates the ways in which people group or categorize documents associated with a voluminous work to guide the construction of organized displays for information retrieval systems (IRSs). Fifty participants completed an unconstrained sorting task in which they were asked to sort into groups 47 documents associated with the voluminous work A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens. Participants were asked to group documents based on how similar they were to each other and such that the groups would help them to remember how to find them at a later time. Data collected from the sorting task were summarized using cluster analysis, employed to discover common groupings created by participants. Groupings discovered frequently shared physical format, language, and audience attributes.

Introduction

The purpose of the research presented in this paper is to discover the ways in which people group or categorize documents associated with a voluminous work such as Shakespeare's Hamlet, to guide the construction of organized displays in information retrieval systems (IRSs). The research emphasizes an area of information seeking seldom examined in information retrieval research, namely, queries for known-items. Two types of query are common in IRSs: queries for subjects or topics, and queries for documents already known to the searcher, or known-item queries. Much of the emphasis in research and development of IRSs has been on subject queries. Subject queries pose serious problems to users and to systems designers, so it makes sense that research has focused on them. Known-item queries, on the other hand, are frequently assumed to be unproblematic because they involve formal search terms, i.e., author names and titles. However, queries for known items, like subject queries, present a variety of significant challenges for retrieval and interface design.

One of the challenges that user interfaces for IRSs must meet with respect to known-item searching is how to display large groups of documents, or records representing documents, sharing various types of bibliographic relationships (see Tillet, 1991 for a taxonomy of these relationships). An example of a group of documents sharing such relationships includes: the motion picture Gone With the Wind; the typescript screenplay used to produce it; a book of trivia about the making of the movie; and the original book by Margaret Mitchell, upon which the screenplay and movie are based. This group of documents is representative of a type of document group that will, in this paper, be called a voluminous work or work set.¹ A voluminous work is a large group of documents sharing a variety of relationships that evolve out of and are linked to a common originator document. In the case of Gone With the Wind, the common originator document is the original written text by Margaret Mitchell. Thus, the Koran, Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, or any of the individual works of Shakespeare would fit the definition of voluminous work. Voluminous works may generate hundreds or thousands of related documents, including editions, translations, works of criticism, and adaptations for other audiences or into other mediums. For example, although published only in 1988, Hawking' A Brief History of Time has already generated over 50 editions, translations, video-recordings, and other related works.