Zhu Manran, Kertész János
Department of Network and Data Science, Central European University, Quellenstraße 51, Vienna, 1100 Vienna Austria.
Center for Collective Learning, CIAS, Corvinus University of Budapest, Kozraktár u. 4-6, Budapest, 1093 Budapest Hungary.
EPJ Data Sci. 2025;14(1):42. doi: 10.1140/epjds/s13688-025-00558-6. Epub 2025 Jun 5.
Data deluge characteristic for our times has led to information overload, posing a significant challenge to effectively finding our way through the digital landscape. Addressing this issue requires an in-depth understanding of how we navigate through the abundance of information. Previous research has discovered multiple patterns in how individuals navigate in the geographic, social, and information spaces, yet individual differences in strategies for navigation in the knowledge space has remained largely unexplored. To bridge the gap, we conducted an online experiment where participants played a navigation game on Wikipedia and completed questionnaires about their personal information. Utilizing the hierarchical structure of the English Wikipedia and a graph embedding trained on it, we identified two navigation strategies and found that there are significant individual differences in the choices of them. Older, white and female participants tend to adopt a proximity-driven strategy, while younger participants prefer a hub-driven strategy. Our study connects social navigation to knowledge navigation: individuals' differing tendencies to use geographical and occupational information about the target person to navigate in the social space can be understood as different choices between the hub-driven and proximity-driven strategies in the knowledge space.
我们这个时代的数据泛滥特征导致了信息过载，这给我们在数字领域中有效地找到方向带来了重大挑战。解决这个问题需要深入了解我们如何在海量信息中导航。先前的研究已经发现了个体在地理、社交和信息空间中导航的多种模式，但在知识空间中导航策略的个体差异在很大程度上仍未得到探索。为了弥合这一差距，我们进行了一项在线实验，参与者在维基百科上玩导航游戏并填写有关他们个人信息的问卷。利用英文维基百科的层次结构以及在其上训练的图嵌入，我们识别出两种导航策略，并发现参与者在这些策略的选择上存在显著的个体差异。年龄较大、白人以及女性参与者倾向于采用接近驱动策略，而年轻参与者则更喜欢枢纽驱动策略。我们的研究将社交导航与知识导航联系起来：个体在社交空间中利用关于目标人物的地理和职业信息进行导航的不同倾向，可以理解为在知识空间中枢纽驱动策略和接近驱动策略之间的不同选择。
