Papers that mentioned serendipity only superficially were not considered.
• No restrictions on how authors defined serendipity.
• Research was empirical, using either or both qualitative or quantitative methods, but with no restrictions on method or methodology.
• No restrictions on research area or topic with respect to:
° information use environment (e.g., work leisure, learning, commerce);
° domain, field, or area (e.g., science, history, education);
° platform, application, or service (e.g., Twitter, WorldCat);
° type of digital device (e.g., mobile, laptop, wearable); and
° content or its format (e.g., text, image, sound).
Seminal works that do not meet the above criteria (e.g., Merton and Barber, 2004) are also referenced throughout the volume, but by conducting the systematic review, we hope that we have provided a useful “state-of-the-art” synthesis of the research on serendipity in digital information environments.
Lori McCay-Peet and Elaine G. Toms
July 2017
Acknowledgments
We are grateful to many colleagues, whose insights and exchanges have contributed over the years to our thinking about serendipity, including Lennart Björneborn, Samantha Copeland, Sanda Erdelez, Jannica Heinström, Stephann Makri, Kim Martin, Anabel Quan-Haase, and Borchuluun Yadamsuren. A SSHRC Aid to Workshops and Conferences Program grant enabled SCORE: Serendipity, Chance and Opportunity in Information Discovery, a workshop hosted in Montreal in 2012, to bring together a group of researchers to unpeel the concept of serendipity in digital information environments.
We also acknowledge financial support for the research that informed much of the thinking behind this volume. Toms’ initial research on browsing in digital user environments (which serendipitously introduced her research to serendipity) was funded by a NSERC (Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada) grant to her Ph.D. supervisor, Professor Jean Tague-Sutcliffe, University of Western Ontario (now Western University). Their individual and joint research, including McCay-Peet’s Ph.D. work, was partially funded by a SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada) Research Grant, on Serendipity in Knowledge Work to Toms; and a SSHRC Doctoral Scholarship to McCay-Peet. Finally, we acknowledge the support of the Canada Foundation for Innovation that funded the research infrastructure that enabled multiple research projects, and Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada who hosted the research projects.
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Mention serendipity to anyone anywhere and it congers up an immediate pleasurable reaction. Many have stories to tell about serendipitous moments when something materialized—an idea or opportunity—often from an interaction with an object or person in the immediate environment. Sometimes it appeared, as though by magic, as a lightning-bolt, thought-in-head. But, whatever it was, it was perceived as value-added, and not previously contemplated or considered.
When we think of serendipity, we associate it first with scientific discoveries and inventions such as dynamite, rubber, penicillin, microwave, photography, X-rays, radioactivity, Liquorice Allsorts, Post-it notes, Viagra, laughing gas, Velcro, Teflon, and Nylon. Arguably, Columbus’ discovery of North America occurred when he was looking for a new trade route to the Orient—a serendipitous find. In this book, we start from those early explanations and understanding of serendipity and consider the concept in the context of digital information environments.
But when is something truly serendipitous? Serendipity is often associated with chance, blind luck, fortuitous events, and accidental coincidences, but these words are not synonymous with serendipity, as many authors have lamented (see, for example, De Rond, 2014; Merton and Barber, 2004; Shaprio, 1986). As you will discover on reading this book, for an event, process, outcome, or experience to be serendipitous, it needs several conditions.
• A person is exposed to an object that is unusual, but is meaningfully unusual.
• The person has the sagacity to observe, identify, and extract elements from the object, and the mental space and tenacity to re-use them in a new way.
• The outcome is unanticipated such that under normal circumstances it would not be predicted.
In short, we are looking at “planned insight coupled with unplanned events” (Fine and Deegan, 1996, p. 435). There is an element of surprise and chance, but an element that can only be acted on by someone capable of understanding, extracting and using that chance finding.
Serendipity may have global impact such as the discoveries and inventions mentioned earlier. But equally it may be very individual such that the chance discovery enabled a similarly unexpected (to the person) find that may not have consequences beyond that person’s sphere.
In this chapter, we examine the concept of serendipity, its historic roots, its problematic nomenclature, and how something that is characterized as serendipitous unfolds.
1.1 ORIGINS OF SERENDIPITY
Serendipity has its roots in the 18th century, but was not popularly used until the second half of the 20th century. Today a search of Google will net over 30 million occurrences, and Google Scholar outputs over 100,000 occurrences in the scholarly literature. This is in contrast with Merton and Barber (2004) who identified only 135 people from the word’s origin to the mid-20th century who had used the word in print. Remarkably, there is no equivalent word in some languages (Martinez, 2011).
The first use of the word, serendipity, appeared in a letter dated January 28, 1754 from a man of letters and politician, Horace Walpole, known for his neologisms, to his friend and diplomat, Horace Mann. In that letter, Walpole was commenting on his search for an image about a Venetian coat of arms. He writes:
This discovery indeed is almost of that kind which I call serendipity, a very expressive word, which as I have nothing better to tell you, I shall endeavour to explain to you: you will understand it better by the derivation than by definition. I once read a silly fairy tale, called The Three Princes of Serendip: as their Highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of: for instance, one of them discovered that a mule blind in the right eye had travelled the same road lately, because the grass was eaten only on the left side, where it was worse than on right—now do you understand serendipity? One of the most remarkable instances of this accidental sagacity (for you must observe that no discovery of a thing you are looking for comes under this description) was of my Lord Shaftsbury, who happening to dine at Lord Chancellor Clarendon’s, found out the marriage of the Duke of York and Mrs. Hyde, by the respect which her mother treated her at the table (as quoted in Remer, 1965, p. 6).
The key point of the story is that three odd observations led the princes to identify the characteristics of a mule even though they had neither seen the mule, nor were looking for a mule. It was a case of insightful observation and inference (Merton and Barber, 2004). Similarly, in the second also unusual example over dinner, shrewd observation coupled with sagacity led to an unexpected conclusion (and one would need to be an expert in the etiquette of the day to fully grasp the logic). Walpole’s seemingly innocuous reflections informed the concept
