Standing on the schemas of giants: socially augmented information foraging

  • Authors:

  • Aniket Kittur;Andrew M. Peters;Abdigani Diriye;Michael Bove

  • Affiliations:

  • Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA;Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA;Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA;Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing
  • Year:
  • 2014

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

People spend an enormous amount of time searching for complex information online; for example, consumers researching new purchases or patients learning about their conditions. As they search, people build up rich mental schemas about their target domains; which, if effectively shared, could accelerate learning for others with similar interests. In this paper we introduce a novel approach for integrating the schemas individuals develop as they gather information online and surfacing them for others with similar interests. Through a controlled experiment we show that having access to others' schemas while foraging for information helps new users to induce more useful, prototypical, and better-structured schemas than gathering information alone.