Developing organized information displays for voluminous works: a study of user clustering behavior

摘要

This paper investigates the ways in which people group or categorize documents associated with a voluminous work to guide the construction of organized displays for information retrieval systems (IRSs). Fifty participants completed an unconstrained sorting task in which they were asked to sort into groups 47 documents associated with the voluminous work A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens. Participants were asked to group documents based on how similar they were to each other and such that the groups would help them to remember how to find them at a later time. Data collected from the sorting task were summarized using cluster analysis, employed to discover common groupings created by participants. Groupings discovered frequently shared physical format, language, and audience attributes.