A few weeks back, I asked a customer perusing dictionary stands at the Michigan Ave store how he used his dictionary in his personal work method.
His response spurred a few compelling questions. Although a vast plane of information seems at ones’ fingertips with access to services like Google, Wikipedia, Ask, and the hive-mind of Twitter, Del.icio.us, Mosio, and GigaFloat, the most valuable quality of the physically limited codex is the exposure to peripheral content. Every search term is contextualized within its alphabetical neighbors. The user experience of examining a physical page could arguably be a richer experience if one is not only interested in learning about a single subject.
Merriam-Webster Online offers this option of lateral discovery, albeit through a separate step removing oneself from the primary search via the “Browse words next to:” link.
Merriam-Webster: example of lateral discovery -
Traditional web-search platforms have made great steps to isolate relevant content for each search term, innovating the format of such results to include video and audio as well as traditional text links. However, what would happen if peripheral context was introduced? Would there be a demand for a user interface that rewrites the nature of why one chooses to search for content online?
A compelling long-term direction for online lateral search, using a multimedia engine only possible in a digital platform, would be to experiment with the dissolution of dependence upon the act of reading for gathering pertinent information. The authority of verbal communication over visual, auditory, temporal, and spatial modes of learning could be challenged in exciting new methods for augmenting cognition.
