Serendipitous search practices of media researchers: Developing techniques to elicit ‘the unforeseen'

“Serendipitous search practices of media researchers: Developing techniques to elicit ‘the unforeseen’” deals with the relation between serendipity, creativity and search. It presents insights into the role of serendipitous search for media researchers’ unearthing of research ideas and insights. Media researchers increasingly rely on digital access to audiovisual archived material to collect data. This stipulates that to retrieve relevant material, researchers require an in-depth understanding of digital search. Using qualitative (focus group and interview) data, this paper draws conclusions about how media researchers experience and elicit serendipitous search, as a form of craft. These conclusions aid the development of new search algorithms that embrace serendipitous search as a source of innovation.