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2) How often do historians claim to experience serendipity in these digital

environments?

3) Which features of the digital environment do historians feel support serendipity?

4.1

Literature Review: Serendipity in the Digital

Environment

In his book “Where Good Ideas Come From”, Steven Johnson (2011) devotes an entire chapter to serendipity. He describes various techniques that one can try to inspire serendipitous connections, and tells his readers of his own methods of using a digital environment called DEVONThink to create connections between items and thoughts he

has saved on his computer.6 Johnson then notes a “puzzling meme” which has surfaced in the media: one that argues that the Web and digital environments are leading to a decline in serendipitous experiences (p. 117). Through a discussion of serendipitous experiences in digital and physical environments, Johnson concludes: “This is the irony of the serendipity debate: the thing that is being mourned has actually gone from a fringe experience to the mainstream of culture” (p.119). For Johnson, the Web has several attributes (connections to a global culture, hypertext links, and information diversity to name a few) that support serendipity. Whether or not all Web users are experiencing serendipity regularly Johnson (2010) leaves up for debate, but he still argues “the Web is an unrivaled medium for serendipity if you are actively seeking it out” (p.121).

Several recent studies by Library and Information Science (LIS) scholars have

investigated the role of serendipity in digital environments, focusing on aspects such as the tension between online search and exploration (Quan-Haase & McCay-Peet, 2014), how to observe serendipity in these environments (Makri et al., 2015), and how

individual characteristics may influence serendipity on the Web (McCay-Peet et al., 2015). A review of this literature will lay the groundwork for the present study investigating serendipity in the historical research process.

In an attempt to trigger a serendipitous encounter in a digital environment Toms and McCay-Peet (2009) set up an observational laboratory study that saw 96 participants complete three tasks using a Wikipedia-based tool developed for the study, called “Suggested Pages”. Forty percent of their participants used the tool, reporting that the links they found through “Suggested Pages” were relevant to their assigned tasks, and were surprising, but some also deemed them as a distraction from the task at hand. The authors concluded that the lab setting did not replicate typical behaviour, and that there was much left to understand about how to trigger a serendipitous encounter with information.

6

DEVONthink is an information management tool for collecting and organizing information, which also enables connections between files and documents (“DEVONthink,” 2016).

Race (2012) examined the serendipitous features associated with web-scale discovery tools such as WorldCat and EBSCO. She noted the importance of personalizing the search process, and demonstrated that interactivity between the user and the computer system is likely to help users better realize interconnections. The main strength in Race's article lies in her summary of web-scale discovery tools that support serendipity. Here Race managed to break down the various tenets of serendipity (browsability, hypertext links, visualization of results, etc) and determine whether each of the aforementioned tools supports these features.

In a report that accompanied her doctoral research, McCay-Peet (2013) outlined the development of questionnaires she created as “direct measures of serendipity”. These questionnaires consist of four questions that are asked of survey participants three

separate times, in order to capture the perceived frequency of serendipity in A) a specific digital environment, B) digital environments in general, and C) in general, with no environment in mind. McCay-Peet, et al. (2015) later employed these questionnaires in conjunction with other measurements to analyze the role of the environment and

individual differences in experiencing serendipity. They concluded that the “environment matters” when serendipity is under investigation, and called for further development and validation of these questionnaires (McCay-Peet et al., 2015).

In another attempt to investigate serendipity in digital environments, McCay-Peet, Toms, and Kelloway (2014) conducted several studies in which they created and refined scales to measure how well specific digital environments support serendipity. They identified five facets of a serendipitous digital environment as follows:

1) Trigger-rich: The digital environment is filled with a variety of information, ideas, or resources interesting and useful to the user.

2) Enables connections: The digital environment exposes users to combinations of information, ideas, or resources that make relationships between topics apparent. 3) Highlights triggers: The digital environment actively points to or alerts users to

interesting and useful information, ideas, or resources using visual, auditory, or tactile cues.

4) Enables exploration: The digital environment supports the unimpeded examination of its information, ideas, or resources.

5) Leads to the unexpected: The digital environment provides fertile ground for unanticipated or surprising interactions with information, ideas, or resources.

(McCay-Peet, Toms, & Kelloway, 2014, n.p.) McCay-Peet, Toms, and Kelloway (2014) also conduct an expert review to create a 37– point scale of serendipity in digital environments, and used the analysis of variance approach to explore the first set of findings, in which 107 university students assessed tools according to the five facets of serendipity listed above. Their findings helped them to refine their scale, particularly for the facets “Trigger-Rich” and “Highlights Triggers” in preparation for future studies on the topic.

Other studies of serendipity in digital environments focus on how best to capture these experiences, which are most often collected in the form of self-reports (Makri et al., 2015). Makri et al. (2014) interviewed 14 creative professionals about their personal strategies for influencing serendipity, and then discussed the various ways that digital environments support these strategies. For example, one strategy included was “varying their routines”, which the authors suggested that designers of digital environments support serendipity by suggesting access to material tangentially related to their work, or by encouraging people with similar interests to share links. They concluded that digital environments that support these various serendipity strategies would be more beneficial to both creative professionals and general users because they would support elements of serendipity, rather than attempting to offer “serendipity on a plate” (Makri et al., 2014, p. 2181).

In a more recent study, Makri et al. (2015) returned to the observation of serendipity, claiming that “with a carefully considered approach, serendipity-related information interaction behaviour can be directly observed” (p. 1). Their approach included asking three sets of participants to use three different information environments to perform an information-seeking task of their choice. Their participants performed the task in an office, where they were asked to think aloud during the their search for information and

to bookmark relevant sites. They then answered questions about the process and the sites they had saved which provided the data for the study. The authors concluded that most of the sites the participants considered useful were made by recommendation systems, and that digital environments such as library web sites might consider broadening their reader recommendations to include those by the same author or with similar citations to the one the user is viewing (Makri et al., 2015).

The literature review above shows there are a number of methods of analysis available to study this phenomenon. It also makes apparent the lack of studies done on a single population’s experiences with serendipity (with the exception of Makri et al 2014). In order to demonstrate the reason for selecting historians as the target population for this study, the following section will provide the background on historian’s experiences with serendipity in the digital environment.