Wayfinder: A tool for tagging to equalize opportunities for sense-making

Meghan Dougherty, PhD Candidate, Communication

(guest blog by Shaun Kane)

Wayfinder: A tool for tagging to equalize opportunities for sense-making in a collection of archived objects

This week Meghan presented her work on the Wayfinder project (http://www.wayfinder.webarchivist.org). This project is part of Meghan’s dissertation work, and is part of the larger Web Archivist project presented previously.

The Wayfinder project continues the exploration of representing digital scholarship digitally. By moving beyond traditional paper- based formats, we may explore alternate representations for scholarly information. Different media present different affordances, and may expose different social and epistemological issues. Wayfinder leverages the affordances of the web to enable new interactions with scholarly information. On the web, readers are able to act as content producers themselves, and can engage in a recursive dialogue with authors. The project also enables new modes of accessing and understanding scholarly information by allowing users to navigate and annotate data, and to create their own paths through a data set.

Facilitating User-System Coordination by Exploring Linguistic Evidence, Community Membership Information, and Perceptual Evidence

Hongyan Ma presented her dissertation work today.  Her research involves testing the power of “coordination theory” to improve search (Information Retrieval or “IR”). She developed a model and tested it through a proof-of-concept system. Her talk prompted the audience to speculate about the role of user-generated information and IR. In simple terms, a major discussion question was: “How much should we depend on user-generated content to improve search?”