Craigdata
Craig Treadaway was an HF Master's student at Clemson Several years ago. For his thesis, he looked at how individual differences in cognitive abilities affected search outcomes on the internet. He measured the search behavior of 200 undergraduates doing 10 different search tasks using a tool called Uzilla developed by Andy Edmonds (another CU HF grad). Since Uzilla recorded all the search behavior, and Craig only used the outcome information (eg, did the participant find the right answer) that left a mountain of data to mine.
Dr. Gugerty and I decided to use that data to try to see if there are any differences in the way people search based on individual differences in cognitive abilities. This project is still ongoing, so I don't want to give away too much.
To mine the data, we had to create a Pascal (yes, you read that right) program that would parse the text information output by Uzilla. The program then counts searches, search terms, recursive searches, and a host of other things. Then we put the output into a spreadsheet with outcome information and cognitive ability information.
At this point we are close to finishing this project, so stay tuned.
