Capturing, Documenting and Visualizing Search Contexts for building Multimedia Corpora

In Social Science research, multimedia documents are often collected to answer particular research questions like: "Which of the aesthetic properties of a photo are considered important on the web" or "How has Street Art developed over the past 50 years". Therefore, a researcher generally issues multiple queries to a number of search engines. This activity may span over long time intervals and results in a collection which can be further analyzed. Documenting the collection building process which includes the context of the carried out searches is imperative for social scientists to reproduce their research. Such context documentation consists of several user actions and search attributes like: the issued queries; the results clicked and saved; duration a particular result was viewed for; the set of results that was displayed but neither clicked, nor saved; as well as user annotations like comments or tags. In this work we will describe a search process tracking module and a search history visualization module. These modules can be integrated into keyword based search systems through a REST API which was developed to help capture, document and revisit past search contexts while building a web corpora. Finally, we detail the implementation of how the module was integrated into the LearnWeb2.0 platform - a multimedia web2.0 search and sharing application which can obtain resources from various web2.0 tools such as Youtube, Bing, Flickr, etc using keyword search.