Panel: Social Tagging and Folksonomies: Indexing, Retrieving and Beyond?

Searching and browsing via tag clouds

Jacek Gwizdka
Department of Library and Information Science Rutgers University

Sunday, Oct 09, 2011

CONTACT:

www.jsg.tel

Process of Tagging
Users associate tags with web resources Tags serve in social, structural, and semantic role
structural role: starting points for navigation; helping users to orient themselves semantic role: description of a set of associated resources

Tag Clouds

My Claims
Tag Clouds help in information search
by saving searchers effort

Tag Clouds do not support browsing tasks

do not show relationships and do not show history

Not just claims

Research Question
Do tag clouds benefit users in search tasks?

User Interface with Overview Tag Cloud

Overview Tag Cloud UI

List UI Search Result List Tag Cloud

Our retrieval system populated with data from delicious

User Actions in Two Interfaces

1. List
Start

New Tag

View Search Results

Delete Tag

click

Click Result URL

Click Back button View one result page

Click Done & enter answer

End

2. Overview Tag Cloud

Experiment Design
37 participants
Working memory assessed using memory span task (Francis & Neath 2003)

Within subject design with 2 factors: task and user interface Tasks
everyday information search (e.g., travel, shopping) at two levels of task complexity Four task rotations for each of two user interfaces
Fact finding Fact finding Information gathering Information gathering Information gathering Information gathering Fact finding Fact finding Fact finding Information gathering Fact finding Information gathering Information gathering Fact finding Information gathering Fact finding
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Measures
Task completion time Cognitive effort:
from mouse clicks: user decisions expressed as user selection of search terms = number of queries, opening documents to view from eye-tracking reading effort measures: (based on intermediate reading model) scanning vs. reading; length of reading sequences; reading fixation duration, number of regression fixations in reading sequence, spacing of fixations in reading sequence.

Task outcome = relevance * completeness

Results

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Results : Time and User Behavior

Overview Tag Cloud + List made users faster and more efficient
less time on task: 191s in Overview+List vs. 261s in List UI less queries: 7 in Overview+List vs. 8.3 in List UI no significant differences in task outcomes

Overview Tag Cloud facilitated formulation of more effective queries

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Results : Cognitive Effort

Overview Tag Cloud + List required less effort, higher efficiency
less fixations (total and mean reading seq len) more efficient less regressions less difficulty in reading

List

Overview Tag Cloud + List

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Results : Cognitive Effort

Overview Tag Cloud + List required less effort, higher efficiency
less fixations (total and mean reading seq len) more efficient less regressions less difficulty in reading

Comparing only results list region in two UI conditions

less effort invested in results list in Overview Tag Cloud + List

Overview Tag Cloud helped to lower cognitive demands

List

Overview Tag Cloud + List

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Did Tag Cloud Help All Users?

No there are individual differences

Two users, same UI and same task

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Is Tag Cloud Helpful?

Yes! Overview Tag Cloud + List UI made people faster and required less effort
also reflected in a number of eye-tracking measures

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Browsing large sets of tagged documents

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An Example of Browsing (CiteULike)

1. information 2. retrieval 3. algorithms 4. phylogeny

A typical model of browsing with tag clouds: Pivot browsing: a lightweight navigation mechanism

Is There a Problem?

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Users Conceptualizations
The journey

The labyrinth

The space switching direction and being stack increasing distance, and continuity

being lost

18 participants

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What s the Problem?

Users
feel lost experience switching , yet expect some continuity

In Pivot Browsing each step is treated as a separate move

View is re-oriented - New list of documents along with their tags At each step context is switched Relationships between steps are not shown
e.g., overlap between tag clouds not indicated

Pivot browsing seems to be not lightweight

conceptualizing multiple tags assigned in different quantities to different documents is difficult

Research Questions
How can we support continuity in tag-space browsing? How can we promote better understanding of tag-document relationships (sensemaking)?

Recall: Example of Navigation (CiteULike)

1. information 2. retrieval 3. algorithms 4. phylogeny

User Interface with History tag clouds (Tag Trails)

Supporting continuity in tag-space navigation by providing history
information retrieval algorithms phylogeny

History tag clouds

User Interface with Heat map (Tag Trails 2)

Supporting continuity in tag-space navigation by providing history and making (some) relationships (more) explicit
Column-tags: most recently visited tags
from left to right

Tag cloud

Heat map

Results list

Row-tags: selection of most frequent tags Cells color-coded according to tags df

Summary & Conclusions

Tagging metadata for free : does the effort pay off?

Yes, but not for all tasks Tag clouds

helpful in search tasks but to support browsing new presentations of tags needed

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Thank you!
Jacek Gwizdka | contact: http://jsg.tel
Related publications:

Questions?

Gwizdka, J. (2009a). What a difference a tag cloud makes: Effects of tasks and cognitive abilities on search results interface use. Information Research, 14(4), paper 414. Available online at <http://informationr.net/ir/14-4/paper414.html> Gwizdka, J. (2010c). Of kings, traffic signs and flowers: Exploring navigation of tagged documents. In Proceedings of Hypertext 2010 (pp. 167-172). ACM Press. Gwizdka, J. & Bakelaar, P. (2009a). Tag trails: Navigating with context and history. CHI 09 extended abstracts (pp. 4579-4584). ACM Press. Gwizdka, J. & Bakelaar, P. (2009b). Navigating one million tags. Short paper and poster presented at ASIS&T 2009, Vancouver, BC, Canada. Cole, M.J. & Gwizdka, J. (2008). Tagging semantics: Investigations with WordNet. Proceedings of JCDL 2008. ACM Press. Gwizdka, J. & Cole, M.J. (2007). Finding it on Google, finding it on del.icio.us. In L. Kovcs, N. Fuhr, & C. Meghini (Eds.), Lecture notes in computer science (LNCS): Vol. 4765. Research and advanced technology for digital libraries, ECDL 2007. (pp. 559-562). Springer-Verlag

Extra Slides
Intro to Reading model Tag cloud examples

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Introducing Reading Model

Scanning fixations provide some semantic information
limited to foveal visual field (1r visual acuity) (Rayner & Fischer, 1996)

Reading fixation sequences provide more information than isolated scanning fixations
information is gained from the larger parafoveal region
asymmetrical, in dir of reading) (Rayner et al., 2003) (5r beyond foveal focus;

some types of semantic information is available only through reading sequences

We implemented the E-Z Reader reading model (Reichle et al., 2006)

Lexical fixations duration >113 ms (Reingold & Rayner, 2006) Each lexical fixation is classified to Scanning or Reading (S,R) These sequences used to create a two-state model

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Reading Model States and Characteristics

Two states: transition probabilities Number of lexical fixations and duration

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Example Reading Sequence

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Tag Clouds Everywhere!

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