Truth in a sea of data: adoption and use of data search tools among researchers and journalists

ABSTRACT

The increasing availability of data search tools brings opportunities for non-expert users. Among these users, interdisciplinary researchers and data journalists represent a growing population whose work can lead to societal benefit. Through in-depth interviews, we examine what strategies and approaches researchers and journalists adopt to search online data, how they apply current technology to facilitate dataset search, and the barriers and difficulties that they encounter in their work with data. Our findings reveal that with technological limitations in the aspects of searchability, interactivity and usability, dataset search for non-experts remains a challenge. We have found that little attention has been paid to non-experts’ emerging data need, significantly constraining the design and development of technological tools for supporting non-expert users. Our findings underline the critical impact of the design, development and deployment of technological tools to enable the meaningful use of today’s increasingly available data toward a civil society.

KEYWORDS:

• Non-experts
• dataset search
• searchability
• interactivity
• usability

Disclosure statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest that relates to the research described in this paper.

Additional information

Funding

This work is supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant Number III-1816325.

Notes on contributors

Haiyan Jia

Haiyan Jia is an assistant professor in the Department of Journalism and Communication at Lehigh University. Her research interest primarily focuses on the social and psychological effects of communication technology ranging from the Web to mobile apps to smart objects. She also researches how technology advances data journalism and shapes privacy perceptions and behaviors.

Larrisa I. Miller

Larrisa I. Miller is a PhD student in the Department of Communication at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research primarily focuses on the digital information ecosystem. She is interested in misinformation flow, political communication, computational social science, and feminist theory.

Jessica Hicks

Jessica Hicks is an independent researcher based in New York City. She graduated from Lehigh University with a Bachelor's Degree in Journalism, Sociology, and Anthropology, and researched data accessibility and its implications for journalism and society at large. Her current work focuses on mental health, well-being, and behavior change in the digital health technology industry.

Ethan Moscot

Ethan Moscot is a master's student in the Cybersecurity and Public Policy Program at Tufts University. His research interests primarily lie at the intersection of data and policy. His current research explores the technical, political, and legal factors related to information privacy.

Alissa Landberg

Alissa Landberg is a senior at Lehigh University majoring in both Cognitive Science and Computer Science. Her research interests focus on the interdisciplinary relationship between behavioral and technical studies. Within these fields, she focuses on collective privacy dimensions within smart home environments and technical improvements and user perspectives to enhance dataset search.

Jeff Heflin

Jeff Heflin is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Lehigh University. His specific research interests include machine learning for dataset search and augmentation, establishing semantic interoperability between heterogeneous information systems, exploration and analysis of complex data, scalable ontology reasoning, and developing formal theories of distributed ontology systems.

Brian D. Davison

Brian D. Davison is a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Lehigh University and provides leadership to the university’s interdisciplinary data science programs. He also serves as associate director of Lehigh’s Institute for Data, Intelligent Systems and Computation (I-DISC). His research includes search, mining, recommendation and classification problems in text, on datasets, on the Web and in social networks.