A colleague of mine sends the following query. If anyone has good tips please pass them on to him, Thank you. Nancy

From: "Allan Hanson" <hanson@ku.edu> To: "Nancy Baym" <nbaym@ku.edu> Subject: Bibliographic request

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One of my arguments is that keyword searching tends to give a number of results that are fairly high in information (in the technical sense of information theory...unpredictability), and that can be conducive to new insights and creative thinking as the user tries to figure out why certain results were returned. It seems to me that this is somewhat similar to surfing the web, where people may be stimulated to think about things in new ways as they go from site to site and, in the process, encounter ways of approaching things that had not occurred to them before. I haven't been able to find anything about how web surfing affects the way people think about things. Do you know of anything that has been done along those lines?

Many thanks,

Allan

Allan Hanson Professor of Anthropology

-- Nancy Baym http://www.ku.edu/home/nbaym Communication Studies, University of Kansas Bailey Hall, 1440 Jayhawk Blvd., Room 102, Lawrence, KS 66045-7574, USA Association of Internet Researchers: http://aoir.org