The body has long been recognized by other disciplines as a site of meaning-making, a medium through which individuals experience the world, convey meaning to others, and act on the world. However, when it comes to searching for information, the body is often ignored, overshadowed by a focus on cognition. Studies are beginning to fill this gap, pointing to the role and potential impact the body can have on information practices, prompting further attention to the role of the body in information seeking and how it can inform the design of interactive information retrieval systems. Beauty information practices, due to their close association with the corporeal, physical, material, and symbolic nature of the body, potentially harbours significant insights for re-centering the body in information sciences and informing user-, or in this case, body-centered information retrieval systems. Our research aimed at answering the overarching question: How does ‘embodiment’ manifest in beauty related information seeking using digital tools? We undertake a survey through Prolific asking participants to describe a recent beauty information search task using digital tools, encompassing the type of information sought, their motivation, and its usefulness. The findings reveal the significance of the socio-cultural context of users, in terms of both social pressure and user agency, and the intersection between the physicality of the body and materiality of beauty products and procedures in shaping how users search for and select useful information.

Studies on healthy ageing have shown that access to information can improve women’s experiences during menopause. However, due to socioeconomic barriers and the quality or complexity of the available menopause information, women lack adequate information about menopause. Previous reviews have critically analysed women’s preferences for menopause information sources, the factors influencing their decision-making, and the menopause topics they seek information about. Yet, there is limited understanding on why women select certain sources or how they use them. This leaves a gap in evidence for information providers who wish to create accessible and informative menopause-related resources. In this paper, we present a thematic synthesis of 53 studies that empirically examined how women interact with information about menopause to identify information use and evaluation practices. Our synthesis identified seven distinct ways women use information about menopause and four methods that are used to evaluate these resources. We also highlight how women’s information practices are often negatively enacted upon by taboos, sexism and racism. In this light, we centrally found that women use information to gain control over their menopause experiences and evaluate the measure of control information sources provide, seeking out empowering, tailored and personalisable sources. Finally, we propose a set of recommendations that emphasises the importance of considering information practices, particularly information use when designing information access systems or creating information sources on menopause.

Malawi is home to over ten local languages, including Chichewa, yet many of these languages lack both printed and digital resources. Consequentially, access to information in these languages is limited, and this hinders knowledge sharing, which may potentially impact socio-economic development. In this paper, we discuss our work on developing language resources and tools for Chichewa. We begin by providing an overview of the Chichewa language, and highlight its inherent complexities that require new approaches to informa tion retrieval (IR) and natural language processing (NLP). We then present our past, current, and ongoing research and conclude with future directions. Our goal is to engage with the IR community to discuss how we can advance IR for low resource languages (LRLs) like Chichewa.

Abstract Creativity is one of the critical skills for people in a variety of academic, work, and everyday life contexts. Searching for information is essential to the creative process. Despite the recent increased attention in research on information searching for creative tasks, there is still little understanding of how people search for information to generate novel and useful ideas. This study aims to address three key research questions: (1) What search processes do people engage in while completing creative tasks, (2) what creative thinking strategies are employed when searching to generate ideas, and (3) what challenges do people encounter while searching for creative tasks. The data were collected at a university in the United States using multiple methods, combining pre‐task interviews, search sessions that involved the generation of new ideas, and post‐task interviews. Drawing from the data analysis from 31 interviews and search sessions, we present a conceptual framework for information searching for creative tasks across academic and everyday search contexts. Our findings highlight exploration as a critical search activity when searching to generate ideas. The results of this study enhance our understanding of the relationship between search activities and creative thinking strategies.

Users searching for information in academic contexts often need to compare different perspectives, organize search results, and synthesize topics. To support people’s creative thinking processes while searching for academic information, we developed SearchIdea, a Web-based online tool, that enables users to actively interact with search results beyond evaluation and selection. Through its three primary features–search-results, SearchMapper, and IdeaMapper–SearchIdea allows users to add saved search results to SearchMapper for comparison, prioritization, and rearrangement. Using IdeaMapper, users can elicit keywords from search results, brainstorm, and organize ideas while identifying relationships among ideas. We also developed a baseline tool, IdeaPad, which provides users with a simple pad for writing and editing text. We then conducted an evaluation study with 58 students at a university in the United States. The study subjects were assigned to either SearchIdea or IdeaPad and performed two search tasks: (1) generating as many ideas as possible, and (2) selecting the best idea after generating multiple ideas. The results showed that subjects using SearchIdea entered more unique search terms, generated longer queries, and engaged with search results more actively than those who used IdeaPad. The SearchIdea users reported higher ratings for idea generation in terms of synthesizing and organizing ideas than did the IdeaPad users. The findings of our study provide insights into how an idea generation tool can connect search activities with creative thinking processes in order to generate more and better ideas.

Creative thinking processes involve a set of cognitive operations and behaviors people engage to generate new ideas and solutions. Information searching is an integral part of the creative thinking process. The purpose of this study is to discover the creative thinking processes and search strategies students use to generate new ideas in academic and everyday life information use contexts. The data were collected through a pre-task interview, a search session for a creative task, and a post-task interview. Fifteen graduate students at a research university participated in the study. From the data analysis, we identified four distinctive, yet interconnected creative thinking processes: planning for creative search tasks, searching for new ideas, synthesizing search results, and organizing ideas. Based on these findings, we point out the need to design search systems to support creative thinking processes during searching to facilitate generation of new ideas.

Most of the Web is published in languages not accessible to many potential users who are only able to read and understand their local languages. Prior research has focused on using translation to provide users with information written in other languages, yet there are still many languages with little or no such resources. In this paper, we propose the use of intercomprehension -- a form of communication in which speakers of two different languages communicate using their own languages, mainly due to similarities between the languages. Accordingly, we conducted a user study on six Sub-Saharan languages to explore: user interaction behaviour in a retrieval environment where intercomprehension is expected; to investigate the usefulness of search results that assume intelligibility and relevance; and investigate affective episodes associated with intercomprehension in retrieval through retrospection. Although intercomprehension may come with a cost to understand unfamiliar languages, our results show that user preference of ranking of search results in related languages incorporates intelligibility. Our findings also suggest that intercomprehension is useful in retrieval for related languages -- users are able to identify relevant documents as well as complete search tasks by applying intercomprehension. However, the negative emotions or frustration associated with intercomprehension suggest that this type of interaction should be used in extreme cases where there are no or very few relevant documents in the language of the query.