Micro-serendipity: Meaningful Coincidences in Everyday Life Shared on Twitter

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingArticle in proceedingsResearchpeer-review

1489 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

In this paper we present work on micro-serendipity: investigating everyday contexts, conditions, and attributes of serendipity as shared on Twitter. In contrast to related work, we deliberately omit a preset definition of serendipity to allow for the inclusion of micro-occurrences of what people themselves consider as meaningful coincidences in everyday life. We find that different people have different thresholds for what they consider serendipitous, revealing a serendipity continuum. We propose a distinction between background serendipity (or ‘traditional’ serendipity) and foreground serendipity (or ‘synchronicity’, unexpectedly finding something meaningful related to foreground interests). Our study confirms the presence of three key serendipity elements of unexpectedness, insight and value (Makri & Blandford, 2012), and suggests a fourth element, preoccupation (foreground problem/interest), which covers synchronicity. Finally, we find that a combination of features based on word usage, POS categories, and hashtag usage show promise in automatically identifying tweets about serendipitous occurrences.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the iConference 2013
Number of pages13
Place of PublicationIDEALS
PublisheriSchools
Publication date28 Jan 2013
Pages196-208
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 28 Jan 2013
EventiConference 2013: Scholarship in Action: Data - Innovation - Wisdom - University of North Texas, Fort Worth, Texas, United States
Duration: 12 Feb 201315 Feb 2013

Conference

ConferenceiConference 2013
LocationUniversity of North Texas
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityFort Worth, Texas
Period12/02/201315/02/2013

Keywords

  • serendipity
  • information behaviour
  • everyday life
  • information sharing
  • social computing
  • social and community informatics
  • qualitative data analysis
  • quantitative data analysis
  • Twitter
  • online social networks

Cite this