A Proposal for Studying Users’ Behaviors in Collaborative Information Seeking through a Convergence Map

The complexity involved in the understanding of human collaboration leads to the design of novel approaches for its study. Particularly, in the context of information seeking little is known about collaboration, indeed only during the last years the study of collaborative information seeking (CIS) has become a subject of interest in the research community. Considering the lack of appropriate methods and resources for studying this phenomenon, in this paper I propose a methodology for collecting data in lab experiments and a multidimensional map, here introduced as the convergence map, for integrating the data collected, as well as describing and studying users’ behaviors in CIS in terms of factors such as relevance, convergence, uncertainty, and affectiveness.