On August 7th [2012], Zookeys published a paper on the discovery of the Semachrysa jade, a new species of the insect green lacewing. The discovery was noteworthy enough to be picked up by Science two days later because Shaun Winterton, the primary researcher, didn't encounter the insect in its native Malaysia, but on the photo-sharing website Flickr.
The discovery made by Winterton and photographer Hock Ping Guek should be heartwarming—not just for utopian-minded futurists and procrastinators seeking justification, but for researchers looking to capitalize on the largest centralized repository of information ever seen. But to make serendipitous discoveries more common, we must first understand their nature.
The word serendipity itself comes from Horace Walpole, who wrote that the main characters in “The Three Princes of Serendip” were “always making discoveries, by accident and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.” We seem to have no trouble remembering the accident part of chance findings, but the second part is worth repeating: a successful discovery lies just not in the unexpectedness of what we find, but in our ability to make sense of it and connect it to what we already know.
Users engaged in casual browsing may be the most receptive to receiving information that’s just outside their specific goals. In An Algorithm for Discovery,” an editorial for Science, neurologists David Paydarfar and William J. Schwartz distilled their recommendations for the discovery process down to five essential elements. The first step, they wrote, was “Slow down to explore.”
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It’s important to note just how Winterton, who is quite fond of using Flickr himself, made the discovery. “The images I came across by Kurt were in fact random, as Flickr presents you with random images when you sign in, presumably based on your previous interest,” wrote Winterton in an email interview.
Had the photos on Winterton’s sign-in page been shown completely at random, he would have seen photos of weddings, landscapes, cities, and cats. Instead, Flickr’s randomness was highly personalized, displaying photos of interest to Winterton based on his user habits.
“The reason personalization creates opportunities for serendipity is that people don’t know what to do with random new information. Instead, we want information that is at the fringe of what we already know, because that is when we have the cognitive structures to make sense of the new ideas,” wrote Jaime Teevan, coauthor of “Discovery is Never by Chance,” via email. “Personalization helps us find things at the fringes of our current knowledge.”
