An Experimental Method for Measuring the Emergence of New Ideas in Information Discovery

Abstract

While sometimes the task that motivates searching, browsing, and collecting information resources is finding a particular fact, humans often use information resources in intellectual and creative tasks that can include comparison, understanding, and discovery. Information discovery tasks involve not only finding relevant information, but also seeing relationships among collected information resources, and developing new ideas. Our hypothesis is that how information is represented impacts the magnitude of human creativity in information discovery tasks. How can we measure this creative cognition? Studies of search have focused on time and accuracy, metrics of limited value for measuring creative discovery.We develop a new experimental method, which measures the emergence of new ideas in information discovery, to evaluate the efficacy of representations. We compare the efficacy of the typical textual list representation for information collections with an alternative representation, combinFormation's composition of image and text surrogates. Representing collections with such compositions increases emergence in information discovery.Measuring Emergence in Information Discovery 3

Integrating implicit structure visualization with authoring promotes ideation

“…Kerne et al extended these metrics for tasks involving information-based ideation and discovery [20].…”

“…Users create information compositions to answer open-ended divergent thinking questions, such as developing a research topic or planning a family vacation. It has been shown that authoring information compositions stimulates emergence of new ideas on information-based ideation tasks [20].…”

“…In MessyDesk, users arrange information in spatial groups to help organize information. Groupings are the basis for emergent ideas in information-based ideation [20] and chunking [35].…”

“…This can occur when Grace is authoring a prior work collection for her science project, highlighting a new focus for her research. Information-based ideation tasks involve assembling and seeing relationships among collected information, developing new ideas, and connecting answers to open-ended questions [20].…”

Evaluation methods for creativity support environments

“…Kerne et al developed a quantitative methodology for the evaluation of information-based ideation tasks, invoking a battery of mutually independent ideation metrics to assess creative products [11]. Webb and Kerne refined methods for calculating the novelty and variety information-based ideation metrics [18].…”