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Learning how: the search for craft knowledge on the internet

Published: 04 April 2009 Publication History

Abstract

Communicating the subtleties of a craft technique, like putting a zipper into a garment or throwing a clay pot, can be challenging even when working side by side. Yet How-To content - including text, images, animations, and videos - is available online for a wide variety of crafts. We interviewed people engaged in various crafts to investigate how online resources contributed to their craft practice. We found that participants sought creative inspiration as well as technical clarification online. In this domain, keyword search can be difficult, so supplemental strategies are used. Participants sought information iteratively, because they often needed to enact their knowledge in order to evaluate it. Our description of people learning how allows us to elaborate existing understandings of information-seeking behavior by considering how search originates and is evaluated in knowledge domains involving physical objects and physical processes.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI '09: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 2009
    2426 pages
    ISBN:9781605582467
    DOI:10.1145/1518701
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 04 April 2009

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    Author Tags

    1. craft
    2. diy
    3. expertise locating
    4. hobbies
    5. how-to
    6. informal learning
    7. information seeking
    8. search usability
    9. social search
    10. tutorial

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    • (2024)Idea-Centric Search: Four Patterns of Information Seeking During Creative IdeationProceedings of the 16th Conference on Creativity & Cognition10.1145/3635636.3656193(280-291)Online publication date: 23-Jun-2024
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