Christoph Hölscher
[Person] [Project]
Christoph Hölscher, Dipl. Psych.
Short Vita
- 1970:
- Born in Bochum (Germany).
- 1991-1997:
- Study of Psychology at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum (Germany).
- 1997:
- Diplom in Psychology at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum(Germany). Thesis: "Subjekt-Verb-Kongruenz in Produktion und Rezeption" [Subject-verb agreement in production and comprehension].
- April 1997 - March 1999:
- PhD student of the Graduate Program "Human and Machine Intelligence" at the
Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg (with scholarship).
- July 1999 - July 2001:
- PhD student of the VGK (with scholarship).
Contact
Phone: ++49 (0) 761 / 203 4939
FAX: ++49 (0) 761 / 203 4938
email: Christoph.Hoelscher@vgk.de
WWW: My homepageInstitut für Informatik und Gesellschaft
Abteilung Kognitionswissenschaft
University of Freiburg
D-79085 Freiburg (Germany)
Ph.D. Project
Topic: Information Seeking on the World Wide Web: Two kinds of expertiseSupervisors: Prof. Dr. G. Strube (Freiburg), Prof. Dr. H. Spada (Freiburg)
Start / projected End of the Ph.D. project: April, 1997 / February, 2000
Summary
Internet Search Engines like Altavista or Fireball are a central part of information seeking on the World Wide Web. The interaction with such search engines and hence keyword-based search (Querying) is an interesting task from a cognitive science perspective, because this interaction is influenced both by technical knowledge and know-how concerning the Web (media-specific Web expertise) and by background knowledge (domain-specific expertise) of the user. Since experienced users make use of search engines regularly for diverse information needs and hence use them quite often, it is reasonable to assume that they will develop particular expert knowledge in mastering these more complex services. The research presented here focuses on interactions with search engines and related services. In addition, query-based searching allows for comparisons with research in Information Retrieval.The behaviour of experienced Internet users and their specific knowledge has not been systematically investigated to date. Thus the first study is of exploratory character and aims at a detailed description of Web expertise, describing typical search behaviour of Web experts and constructing a descriptive model of information seeking with search engines. In this first study both interviews (with card-sorting tasks) and direct observation of expert performance (combined with thinking aloud) were employed.
The interviews were aggregated into an initial process model of information seeking with search engines, which describes the search process from the experts' shared perspective.The observed expert behavior is then categorized and analysed according to this model, revealing typical search behaviors of experienced users.A second study - a lab experiment - addresses the direct comparison of two types of knowledge relevant for efficient Web-based search: the Web-expertise discussed above and background knowledge about the topic area to be searched, which in this case is the European Monetary Union.The subjects were given a set of information-search problems from this domain. A 2 by 2 design of the independent factors Web expertise and domain knowledge results in four experimental groups. Participants with domain knowledge were recruited from students of economics. Web expertise was assessed by interview and a pre-test. In the experiment, two kinds of tasks were used, simulated search tasks and tasks that had to be performed live on the Web.
The data from the second experiment is currently being analysed.
Publications
- Hoelscher, C., & Hemforth, B.
- Subject-Verb Agreement in German: Evidence from Production and Comprehension Experiments. In B. Hemforth & L. Konieczny (Eds.) Cognitive Parsing in German. Dordrecht, NL: Kluwer Academic Press. (in press)
- Bosshardt, H.G., Sappok, C., & Hoelscher, C. (1997).
- Spontaneous Imitation of Fundamental Frequency and Speech Rate by Nonstutterers and Stutterers. Journal of Psycholinguistics, Vol 26(4), 425-448.
Presentations/Workshops/Conferences
- Hoelscher, C. (1999)
- Informationssuche im World Wide Web - Messung von Benutzerverhalten [Information Seeking on the World Wide Web ñ measuring user behavior]. Paper presentet at GOR99 ñ German Online Research meeting, October 1999, Nuernberg, Germany
- Hoelscher, C., & Strube, G. (1999).
- Searching on the Web: Two Types of Expertise. Poster presented at the 22nd International ACM- SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval. August 1999. Berkeley, CA
- Hoelscher, C., & Strube, G. (1999)
- The Role of Knowledge in WWW Search: differences in IR skills and domain expertise. Paper presented at the 10th Mini EURO Conference Human Centered Processes ñ HCP, September 1999, Brest, France
- Hoelscher, Christoph (1998).
- How Internet Experts Search For Information On The Web. in H. Maurer & R.G. Olson (Eds.), Proceedings of WebNet98 - World Conference of the WWW, Internet & Intranet. Charlottesville, VA: AACE.
- Hoelscher, C., Hemforth, B., & Konieczny, L. (1997).
- Subject-Verb-Agreement in German: Production and Comprehension Experiments in Comparison. Poster presented at 10th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, March 1997, Santa Monica, CA
- Hoelscher, C., Hemforth, B., & Konieczny, L. (1996).
- Subjekt-Verb-Kongruenz in Produktion und Rezeption. Paper presented at the 2. Fachtagung der Gesellschaft fuer Kognitionswissenschaft, Hamburg, Germany.
- Hoelscher, C., Hemforth, B., Konieczny, L., & Schulz, T. (1996).
- Subject-Verb Agreement in Production and Comprehension. In J. Hoffmann & A. Sebald (Eds.): Cognitive Psychology in Europe. Proceedings of the Ninth Conference of the European Society for Cognitive Psychology (p.76). Wuerzburg, Germany: Pabst Science Publishers.
- Hoelscher, C., Hemforth, B., Konieczny, L., & Schulz, T. (1996).
- Subject-Verb Agreement in German: Evidence from Production and Comprehension Experiments. Poster session presented at the Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing Conference (AmLAP-96), Torino, Italy.
[Top of Page] [Person] [Project] Christoph Hölscher
Last update: 5 Dec 2002, Erik Ründal
URL: www.vgk.de/projects/hoelscher/index.html