I have finally settled on an overall research question:
How does social language use affect information sharing in user-contributed content repositories?
I’ve been going back and forth on whether I want to say information seeking or information sharing, and I think I’ve finally settled on sharing. I feel like seeking implies a focus on things like information needs and relevance judgments, and I am more interested in focusing on the implications of language choices for the sharing of information among group members, or users of a particular system.
Sharing can be thought of in two different ways. The first is “to tell someone”, as in sharing a secret. The second is “to have in common”, as in a shared experience. Email is one technology for sharing information that operates on the “to tell someone” principle. However, sharing may also be accomplished in the “have in common” sense via online repositories, where group members are able to find and access common information when it is needed.
I also have three specifying questions, corresponding with (I hope) parts of my dissertation:
1. How does common ground (from shared past experience) affect language choices in a collaborative naming task?
2. How do groups organize and share information via an online repository of user-contributed content? What problems do individual members encounter during information seeking within the repository?
3. How do the source of common ground and the intended audience affect filename choices, and the effectiveness of those filenames for supporting information sharing?
The first research question asks how common ground, a factor that has been shown to affect social language use in many different contexts, affects word choices in a synchronous collaborative naming task. The second question sets up a field study exploring how groups use online repositories, particularly for organizing and seeking information. Creating filenames for a group information repository might be thought of as a collaborative naming task, but only if group members do so with others in mind, and it is not clear whether some filenames are better than others for information sharing.
The answers to these two questions will tell me whether it is worthwhile to pursue a link between social language use and naming, by supporting or refuting the existence of such a link, and suggesting processes by which naming choices and information seeking and sharing might be related. In the third question I identify two factors that might affect naming choices and information sharing: source / type of common ground, and intended audience. The influence of these factors will be explored in a two-part lab experiment.
These questions do not address the issues of organization / structure and evolution that I have been thinking about, for practical and scoping reasons. I am working on a couple of other posts that will attempt to position these questions within a larger framework for how to approach the problem of “group information management”.
