Especificaci´on del comportamiento

For the majority of historians who participated in our study, both the physical and digital environments were conducive to the experience of serendipity in their research. Each of these environments held different opportunities for serendipitous encounters with research material. The physical environment of the library was popular amongst our participants in Article One, possibly because of the other questions in the interviews that were associated with e-books, libraries, and information seeking. The historians felt the physical environment was conducive to serendipity because it allowed historians to: 1) browse; 2) place the items they were browsing in context; and 3) had an inherent organizational system that connected research materials by topic. In Article Two, physical environments also played a large role in historians’ experiences of serendipity. Twenty-eight of the 34 serendipity stories collected as part of the surveys took place in a physical environment, most commonly in the archive, regarding the discovery of a primary source. It is necessary here to reflect upon the context in which the participants

gave these stories of serendipity. They were being asked about their historical work, the environments they work in and the materials they encounter as historians. For this reason, so many of the historians’ stories taking place in an archive is not necessarily co- incidental, but is rather a reflection of what historians recall when asked to talk about their work. The archive is central to what a historian does, and to present an important memory from their historical research occurring in the archive is due in part to these scholars, though not necessarily intentionally, performing their identities as historians.7 These stories were collected as part of an online survey, and almost half of the historians who responded to this survey answered “Yes” when they were asked if they considered themselves a digital historian. In Article Three, we investigated how comfortable historians were in digital environments, and also asked them to describe the features of digital environments which they felt supported serendipity. Here we found that many historians were using digital environments like they did physical environments: they used keyword searches to find a specific piece of information, then browsed around that information in whatever way the environment allowed. For these historians, then, it was digital environments that had features that enabled exploration (such as hyperlinks or searchable full-text primary sources), and enabled connections (visualizations or research tools with algorithms that collate similar materials) were those that supported serendipity. Another finding about the digital environment was the prominence of social media in historians’ serendipitous experiences. Twitter in particular was repeatedly noted as a digital environment where connections were made, leading to new insights. Features of social media tools that highlighted useful or interesting links, or triggers aided this

connection to, and through people. On Twitter our participants noted this most commonly occurred via the use of hashtags, though they were also inclined to click on links shared or re-shared by people they followed. One participant referred to this experience as “controlled serendipity” (P16).

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I am thankful to Dr. William Turkel for a discussion on this topic, and for the terminology regarding “performing identity” that I employ here and in the Discussion for Article 2.

As always there were participants whose experiences differed from the majority. In both the interviews and the survey responses, there were several respondents who had not experienced serendipity in the digital environment. They gave two related reasons for this: 1) they felt that the search results returned by digital tools were often too direct to allow for serendipity to occur, and 2) they were unable to place the digital or digitized sources into context, therefore limiting their ability to make connections between material.

In the responses to the interview questions for Article One, which took place between 2010 and 2013, historians were largely unaccustomed to working with e-books, and generally did not find digital environments conducive to serendipity. However, a few of them did indicate that they were using some of the search tools available from their library systems much like physical library shelves: browsing and picking up on material that was relevant to their research. We coded examples of this behaviour as Heuristic Serendipity, a name which we further developed and defined in Article Three as a process of information behavior in which historians use trial and error to create new, innovative methods of supporting serendipity throughout their research.

This heuristic serendipity can be understood as one way that historians’ have responded to the digitization of both their sources, and their methods of access to and collection of research material: they actively pursue environments that can support serendipity, whether physical or digital. As the answers to RQ2 will demonstrate, historians are very much aware of the decisions they make in their research process, and how these choices impact their experiences with serendipity.

5.2

RQ2: How do historians understand the concept of