Search Support for Exploratory Writing
Search Support for Exploratory Writing
What is exploratory writing?
Exploratory writing is a term with no widely agreed upon academic definition. Lee et al. articulated exploratory writing as "the act of pre-writing for a final writing piece to examine a writer's own thoughts and beliefs and discover more about his/her inner mind and connect to the outside world". Pre-writing is a "stage of discovery in the writing process when a person assimilates his 'subject' to himself". Exploratory writing, from this perspective, is "thinking-on-paper [...] to discover, develop and clarify our own ideas". It is a preparatory activity that is conducted to gather topical and non-topical material in support of the topical progression of a final writing piece. Murray referred to this activity as "unfinished writing".
What is complex search?
Exploratory writers engage in complex search tasks. A complex search involves complex information and decisions on how to assess the obtained search results. Such complex search tasks require a disproportionate amount of attention, because complex informa- tion needs are different from simple information needs, where users search for single information elements. As exploratory writing requires reasoning over multiple pieces of evidence and integrating multiple elements of information, the involved complex search tasks incur a high cognitive load on the writer.
Contribution
The design space for exploratory activities is emerging. For instance, Kittur et al. investigated the costs and benefits of structuring information during the sensemaking process. In this paper, we provide the first systematic investigation of exploratory writing from the perspective of exploratory search systems and complex search for online information. We contribute to shaping the space of exploratory writing in the extracurricular context of non-fictional writing. More specifically, we present our studies with GAS, an adapted version of the decision support concept presented by Hosio et al.. GAS allows authors to explore and draw inspiration from a knowledge base of open-ended, subjective data on a specific topic. Thus, it aims to support exploratory writers in both searching and exploring information.
Summary of Results
In our primarily qualitative inquiry, we investigate GAS in supporting exploratory writing. More specifically, we evaluate how it supports complex search tasks when writing a short article. The results from our studies validate GAS as a useful companion to major online search engines in discovering information. GAS helps writers in developing an idea for an article more quickly than online search engines. GAS also reduces the time required to explore the space of possible solutions. Finally, according to self-reported assessment, GAS helps people write articles of higher quality and with higher confidence. Through participant observation and qualitative insights, we also contribute a writer-oriented understanding [22] of the distinct strategies and composing processes that people adopt when searching for open-ended, subjective information in supporting exploratory writing. Finally, we discuss our results in light of related work and focus on the challenges that people encounter when researching a topic online for exploratory writing
Bibtex
@inproceedings{10.1007/978-3-030-29387-1_18,
title = {Search Support for Exploratory Writing},
author = {Oppenlaender, Jonas and Kuosmanen, Elina and Goncalves, Jorge and Hosio, Simo},
editor = {Lamas, David and Loizides, Fernando and Nacke, Lennart and Petrie, Helen and Winckler, Marco and Zaphiris, Panayiotis},
booktitle = {Human-Computer Interaction -- INTERACT 2019},
series = {LNCS 11748},
year = {2019},
venue = {Paphos, Cyprus},
publisher = {Springer International Publishing},
address = {Cham, Switzerland},
pages = {314–336},
isbn = {978-3-030-29387-1},
doi = {10.1007/978-3-030-29387-1_18}
}
Acknowledgements:
This work is partially funded by the Academy of Finland (grants 313224-STOP, 316253-SENSATE and 318927-6Genesis Flagship).