A Subjunctive Exploratory Search Interface to Support Media Studies Researchers Marc Bron 1 Jasmijn van Gorp 2 Frank Nack 1 Maarten de Rijke 1 Andrei Vishneuski 1 Sonja de Leeuw 2 1 ISLA, University of Amsterdam, Science Park 904, 1098 XH Amsterdam, The Netherlands {m.m.bron, nack, derijke, a.vishneuski}@uva.nl 2 TViT, Utrecht University, Muntstraat 2a, 3514 EV Utrecht, The Netherlands {j.vangorp, j.s.deleeuw}@uu.nl ABSTRACT Media studies concerns the study of production, content, and/or reception of various types of media. Today’s continuous production and storage of media is changing the way media studies researchers work and requires the development of new search models and tools. We investigate the research cycle of media studies researchers and find that it is an iterative process consisting of several search pro- cesses in which data is gathered and the research question is refined. Changes in the research question, however, trigger new data gather- ing processes. Based on these outcomes we propose a subjunctive exploratory search interface to support media studies researchers in refining their research question in an earlier stage of their research. To assess the subjunctive interface we conduct a user study and compare to a traditional exploratory search interface. We find that with the subjunctive interface users explore more diverse topics than with the standard interface and that users formulate more specific research questions. Although the subjunctive interface is more com- plex, this does not decrease its usability. These findings suggest that the subjunctive interface supports media studies researchers. The advantage of a subjunctive interface for exploration suggests a new direction for the development of exploratory search systems. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.3.3 [Information Search and Retrieval]: Search process; H.5.2 [User Interfaces]: Evaluation/methodology Keywords Exploratory search, subjunctive interface, humanities 1. INTRODUCTION Media Studies can be situated both the humanities as well as in the social sciences and concerns the study of production, content and/or reception of various types of media, e.g., social media, film, and television [23]. Today’s continuous production and storage of all types of media is changing the way humanities researchers work Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. SIGIR’12, August 12–16, 2012, Portland, Oregon, USA. Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1472-5/12/08 ...$10.00. and the questions they seek to answer [3, 10, 27]. As a result, there is an increasing demand for tools to support exploration and analysis of this data [32, 33]. Tools to support humanities researchers exist but they are often not effective or remain unused [10, 34]. One reason is that, generally, tools are developed without looking at the context and complexity of the task [17]. Moreover, the level of detail at which available models of the research cycle describe search behavior is insufficient to design effective tools [32]. In this paper we start out by investigating the research cycle of media studies researchers. Through an analysis of a series of interviews about the research habits of media studies researchers we arrive at a model of the media studies research cycle. We compare our model to other models of the humanities research cycle, and find that it is consistent with existing models [4, 9] but that it is more detailed in identifying sequences of search processes and their influence on the research question. literature study data collection broad analysis domain exploration inter- pretation reporting literature study data collection refined analysis exploration contextualization presentation vague idea initial RQ refined RQ final RQ phases processes information need Figure 1: Overview of the phases in the media studies research cycle with associated search processes and changes in the re- search question (RQ). Arrows indicate possible sequences. Figure 1 shows the phases in the media studies research cycle with the associated search processes and changes in the research ques- tion. We find that the research cycle of media researchers is an iterative process and that the research question is refined in each step. Take for example the following initial research question: “How are eastern European migrants represented on television,” and its refinement: “How are children of USSR refugees represented in television programs for children from 1980 to 2000.” Every change in the research question, however, triggers new data gathering pro- cesses. Changing the research question comes at a cost as new data has to be collected, organized and analyzed. We observe that factors influencing the research question are discovering alternative views