Fishing for Papers: A Serendipitous Knowledge Discovery Game

Abstract

Fishing has long been used as a metaphor for information-seeking. In the context of literature research, we may see a query act as bait, with the researcher observing what papers “bite”. Taking this analogy literally, we created an open-ended fishing game for literature exploration. Our game aims to support serendipitous knowledge discovery in a playful, relaxing way. In our game, the player uses a virtual bait, the Keyworm (a set of keywords), to catch papers from a Pond (the paper pool for a given venue). To engage players in serendipitous discovery, we introduce a serendipity measurement that categorizes papers into varying levels of rarity. Players are encouraged to iteratively experiment with different keywords to navigate the paper corpus and catch unexpectedly interesting papers. Our game employs the cozy game design principles to provide a relaxing and enjoyable way for visualization researchers to explore the visualization literature. We evaluated the game in playtests with six researchers and made it available as an online demo: https://fishing-for-papers.github.io/game/.