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Washington:
People who have already processed online information to make sense
of a subject can help strangers facing similar tasks. This process
of distributed sense making, say researchers from Carnegie Mellon
University and Microsoft, could save time and result in a better
understanding of the information needed for whatever goal users
might have.
They could be planning a vacation, gathering information about a
serious disease or trying to decide what product to buy, according
to a Carnegie Mellon statement.
Researchers explored the use of digital knowledge maps, a means of
representing the thought processes used to make sense of
information gathered from the Web.
For instance, two people looking to start a garden might live in
different climates or settings, so the types of seeds they might
plant could be different, but each would benefit from elements
such as "design ideas," "how to" and so on. When participants used
a knowledge map that had been created and improved upon by several
previous users, they reported that the quality of their own work
was better than when they started from scratch or used a
newly-created knowledge map.
"Collectively, people spend more than 70 billion hours a year
trying to make sense of information they have gathered online,"
said Aniket Kittur, assistant professor in Carnegie Mellon's
Human-Computer Interaction Institute, who led the study.
"Yet in most cases, when someone finishes a project, that work is
essentially lost, benefiting no one else and perhaps even being
forgotten by that person. If we could somehow share those efforts,
however, all of us might learn faster."
These findings were presented at CHI 2012, the Conference on Human
Factors in Computing Systems, in Austin, Texas, US.
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