Search and serendipity: Teaching Digital Humanities students how to catch serendipity and information encountering in digital search environments

Sabrina Sauer

University of Groningen

How often do you search and browse information online and by chance find something you did not even think you were looking for but that you find useful, inspiring, or surprising? This kind of information encountering (Erdelez & Makri, 2020) is at the basis of my talk. I will present the details of a pedagogical practise that taught master students of the Digital Humanities (DH) programme at the University of Groningen how to research their peers’ experiences of serendipitous information encountering as they explored a large digital audio-visual archive for materials to create audio-visual stories.

DH is a field that works at the intersection of humanities disciplines and digital technology and computation. As part of a course about computational tools and methods, DH master students were offered theoretical, technical, and experiential teaching modules about digital search and serendipity, information encountering, and how to set up user studies primed to “catch” serendipity as part of creative retrieval practices. These modules taught them how to map information encountering, and let them reflect on what these maps indicate about the role of serendipity in digital (re)search practices.

After presenting the developed teaching modules, I compare the insights gained about serendipity as part of search practices in the classroom with earlier research about how search professionals (such as journalists, image researchers and archivists) see “searching for serendipity” as part of their professional skillset (Sauer & De Rijke, 2016). I hope to then open the floor to a discussion about how recognizing serendipitous information encountering is a skill. Ideally, I also want to discuss how teaching students about serendipity encourages them to embrace uncertainty and the unforeseen, thereby opening their research to improvisation and unexpected discoveries.

References Erdelez, S., & Makri, S. (2020). Information encountering re-encountered: A conceptual re-examination of serendipity in the context of information acquisition.

Sauer, S., & de Rijke, M. (2016, July). Seeking serendipity: A living lab approach to understanding creative retrieval in broadcast media production. In

Biography Serendipity and improvisation, especially in creative practices within media production and social innovation processes, fascinate me. While working on my PhD in Science and Technology Studies (2009-2013) which focused on socio-technical innovation facilitated through public-private-civic partnerships in Living Labs, I stumbled on the idea of technological artefacts prescribing particular (use) scripts. With a background in acting, I reinterpreted the idea of a script as something to play on or improvise with. This research into improvisation led me to a postdoctoral project that sought to understand creative retrieval of media professionals: how do “creatives” search in archives to create new media content? To me this hinged on the idea of searching for something you know is in an archive but that seems impossible to find. It was while researching this topic that I encountered serendipity research. Ever since, I have looked at practices of media production, interdisciplinary collaboration and social innovation through the lens of serendipity, because drawing attention to what is considered unforeseen in these practices opens up discussions about what is actually at stake in these practices.

I work at the University of Groningen (The Netherlands), where I am an assistant professor of Media Studies. I teach courses in Media Studies and Digital Humanities on topics that include creativity, and software and data culture, and I encourage students to engage in user research.