ExplorationMap: Supporting Collaborative Exploratory Information Seeking

Exploratory information seeking in a knowledge domain, especially in an interdisciplinary area, with the purpose of learning and getting a sense of the domain is a challenge that new researchers are constantly facing. To address this challenge, we suggest a new visualization-based approach for collaborative exploratory information seeking. First, we introduce ExplorationMap, which is a node-link graph visualization of the pathways explored by the user. Then, we discuss how the ExplorationMap can establish the ground for collaboration between researchers, while exploring a knowledge domain. We believe that ExplorationMap can facilitate sensemaking processes as well as learning through exploratory search, all of which we will verify in the next steps. Author