Arriving Somewhere

Phew! Who knew independent study could be so much work? I have spent the past semester learning to program PHP and MySQL as well as reading up on Exploratory Searching[1] – a topic I knew very little about a few months ago. The more I read, the more I am intrigued!

So now I have begun my major programming project (with barely a month left in the semester) which is to implement a “Categorized Overview”[2][3] on the search feature of an existing web site. I am trying to use my novice programming skills to decipher the website with all of its mysterious variables and function calls and it is slow going. When I think about how much I have left to do (implement CO, run pilot study, write paper) I have to shake my head and laugh at how incredibly ambitious my advisor and I were. It is also frustrating because it is not in my nature to rush things, I much prefer to take my time to completely understand a topic before moving on. I know there are avenues I am missing in researching the design and I want to experiment with more options. But I really have learned a lot this semester and I suppose this reflects the “real world” where deadlines are looming and project development time is never long enough.

I really feel like if I were to do this all correctly, it could easily be a two-semester project and a thesis! If only there were a thesis option for my degree here. Instead we’re stuck with having to pass comprehensive exams in order to graduate. Don’t even get me started on THAT topic…

[1] White RW, Kules B, Drucker SM, Schraefel Supporting Exploratory Search Commun. ACM, Vol. 49, No. 4. (April 2006), pp. 36-39.
[2] Kules, Kustanowitz and Shneiderman Categorizing Web Search Results into Meaningful and Stable Categories Using Fast-Feature Techniques
[3] Univ. of Maryland HCIL Helping users understand search results with categorized overviews