SerenCast: Towards Understanding the Occurrence of Serendipity During the Consumption of Digital Content

The goal of this research is to investigate the factors and processes that lead to the occurrence of serendipity during the consumption of digital content. In the context of recommender systems, serendipity is defined as the act of finding valuable content that is unexpected and unsought for. Hence, the inclusion of serendipity is claimed to challenge the user's curiosity to try the new and unfamiliar which could yield to more enriching and novel experiences. Given the complex and challenging aspects of serendipity (randomness, chance, openness to experience, creativity), various studies are aiming at capturing its nature and in devising methods that can model and induce it in recommender systems. This study focuses on investigating the influence of context information such as location, time, and users' state-of-mind on the occurrence of serendipity. For this purpose, we developed SerenCast; a podcast evaluator system installed on users' mobile devices to elicit a number of factors that capture serendipitous experiences. Later, these factors are analyzed in order to explain which factors lead to the occurrence of serendipity, whether the experience was valuable to the user, and whether it could backfire at times.     «

The goal of this research is to investigate the factors and processes that lead to the occurrence of serendipity during the consumption of digital content. In the context of recommender systems, serendipity is defined as the act of finding valuable content that is unexpected and unsought for. Hence, the inclusion of serendipity is claimed to challenge the user's curiosity to try the new and unfamiliar which could yield to more enriching and novel experiences. Given the complex and challenging as...     »