Georg Pardi successfully defends his dissertation

In his dissertation, which he successfully defended on November 6, Georg Pardi, a doctoral student in the Multimodal Interaction lab, investigated what determines whether people select a video or a text as the result of their web search in the hit list.

His doctoral thesis focuses on the question of the extent to which the knowledge type someone is searching for, influences the modality of the search result, i.e. whether someone selects a video or a text as a result. 

“A classic type of knowledge that people search for is procedural knowledge. Examples of this are 'how to' questions, such as 'How do I tie a figure-eight knot?’. Another type is declarative knowledge, which is often asked with 'what', for example 'What is direct current?”, explains Georg Pardi.

The result of his investigation: the type of knowledge has a significant effect on the preference for certain modalities - but does not fully explain the choice of modality. The degree of spatio-temporal change contained in a task also plays a role. Or as Georg Pardi explains “When it comes to explaining how a figure-eight knot is tied, this explanation contains a lot of elements that we call spatio-temporal changes: ‘First down, then through the loop, then up again, etc.’”. The degree of these expected spatio-temporal changes significantly influences the decision to prefer a certain modality.

Georg Pardi's work contributes to a better understanding of search processes in web use, to increasing their predictability and thus to communicating knowledge more effectively in the long term.