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Track A Morning · 09:30–12:45

Investigating Search: A Hands-on Workshop with the Investigating Search Toolkit

Overview

This workshop invites participants to install, test, and contribute to the Investigating Search Interface, a Chrome browser extension developed at the University of Birmingham that overlays research-led prompts onto Google search results and asks users to think critically about search as they search. The 2025 SEASON workshop introduced the project and gathered design feedback through discussion. This session puts the tool into participants' hands. Attendees will run the Interface on their own devices, generate new content for its database and help shape The Investigating Search Companion, the collaboratively authored reference resource that the Interface draws from.

Who should attend

The session welcomes those encountering the project for the first time, as well as returning participants who wish to engage with the latest prototype and contribute to the project's next steps.

What you'll learn

  • Participants leave with hands-on experience of a research tool in active development, at a stage when their searches, findings, and contributions will help shape what the tool becomes.
  • The session also offers a close encounter with a live design challenge: how academic knowledge about search reaches the people whose searches it describes.

Schedule

09:30–09:45
Introduction and project update. A brief orientation for newcomers, paired with a summary of what has changed since 2025 for returning participants.
09:45–10:15
Hands-on testing: install and search. Participants install the Interface on their own devices, with a pre-circulated installation guide and live troubleshooting support (and paired working as a fallback), and carry out guided search tasks designed to surface the Interface's strengths and limitations in practice: queries where prompts fire effectively, queries where triggers misfire or are absent, and queries that present particular challenges for the tool's design.
10:15–10:45
Coverage sweep. Working in pairs, participants extend the summer coverage map with real searches across everyday domains, logging what the tool matched, how strongly, and whether the match makes sense: the same method the summer evaluation used, applied by a room of search researchers to areas it has not yet reached.
10:45–11:30
Content generation workshop. Working in small groups formed around shared topical interests, participants shift from testing to making. Each group takes a topic area where the coverage evidence shows a gap and produces two outputs. The first is a set of new or improved triggers and prompt text for the Interface. The second is a one-page outline for a Companion entry on that topic: what claims does a general reader need, what sources support them, and what format would be most engaging? Groups draw on their own research expertise to populate areas the current database does not yet cover. Contributions are captured through the project's editorial review process rather than entering the live database directly: nothing reaches users unreviewed.
11:30–12:10
Design feedback and discussion. Groups share their outputs, and the session opens into a facilitated discussion of three design questions that matter for the project's next phase. First, which topic areas should the Companion prioritise for its first commissioned entries, and what criteria should guide that prioritisation? Second, what editorial governance does the Companion need to be credible and sustainable as a collaboratively authored resource? Third, where are the strongest opportunities for classroom or public deployment of the Toolkit?
12:10–12:30
Synthesis and next steps. The session closes with a structured summary of what has been produced, how it will be used, and what the project's next milestones are. That includes the planned user study: its protocol is fixed separately under ethics approval, but the queries and gaps this room produces shape its materials.

Presenter

R
Rosie Graham
University of Birmingham

Rosie Graham is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Co-Director of the Centre for Digital Cultures at the University of Birmingham. Her research focuses on search engines: how to study them, understand their impact on society, and build wider public understanding of the social and ethical issues they generate. She is a primary author of the #FreeWebSearch Charter and has contributed to organisations including the Open Search Foundation. In 2024, she co-founded SEASON: Search Engines and Society Network with Olof Sundin and Dirk Lewandowski. She holds a PhD in English Studies from the University of Exeter.

R.Graham@bham.ac.uk
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