Researching Serendipity in Digital Information Environments. Lori McCay-Peet
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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 of serendipity that we still use to this day, a concept that intertwines acute mental discernment and accident to explain a discovery.
Walpole’s concept remained a private communiqué between the two friends, until Walpole’s correspondence was published in the 1830s. It took another 40 years before the word resurfaced in a public medium. In 1875, it appeared in formal print in the English language in the journal Notes and Queries, where Edward Solly introduced it into literary groups (Merton and Barber, 2004). Even though many incidences of serendipitous findings occurred in science during this period (e.g., vulcanization of rubber, coal tar dye mauve), the word, serendipity, was not used to describe them. In 1909, serendipity had its first appearance in a dictionary, The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia, (the precursor to the Encyclopedia Britannica) and in 1913 it appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary. From the early 1900s to about 1935, serendipity remained used almost exclusively by literary scholars. In the mid-1930s, scientists and, in particular, Cannon (1945) at the Harvard Medical School popularized its role in scientific discovery (Merton and Barber, 2004). The pendulum swung from a dominant use in describing discoveries in science, although serendipity is now widely used throughout all disciplines.
In 1958, Merton and Barber wrote a detailed account of serendipity, but the book languished as a manuscript until 2004 when it was published shortly before Merton’s death. This work, however, remains the most comprehensive discussion of the concept. Since that time, Walpole’s “very expressive word” has entered everyday conversation to describe everything from surprises to random occurrences and unexplained but happy outcomes (Merton and Barber, 2004, p. 4). But we believe that the common use in everyday language has led to dilution in its meaning, which challenges its application in research.
1.2 ON DEFINING SERENDIPITY
Part of the confusion over what is meant by serendipity can be attributed to Walpole (Remer, 1965; Merton and Barber, 2004) who did not make clear how the concept was to be defined and thus used. Merton and Barber (2004) examined its appearance in dictionaries from its conception to the end of the 20th century and concluded that it had been perceived as an “esoteric word” given that it did not appear in any of the abridged dictionaries until 1951.
How it appears in dictionaries illustrates its lack of specificity as these examples demonstrate.
1. An aptitude for making desirable discoveries by accident; good fortune; luck (“serendipity,” n.d.-a).
2. The faculty of making fortunate discoveries by accident; the fact or occurrence of such discoveries; an instance of making such a discovery (“serendipity,” n.d.-b).
3. The faculty or phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for (“serendipity,” n.d.-c).
4. The occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way (“serendipity,” n.d.-d).
5. The faculty of finding valuable or interesting things by chance or where one least expects them (“serendipity,” 1932).
The challenge with these definitions is their use primarily of adjectives (e.g., desirable, fortunate, valuable, agreeable, happy, interesting) that are difficult to operationalize. While the use of the words faculty and aptitude in the definitions suggest ability on the part of the individual experiencing serendipity, sagacity and the prepared mind are missing, suggesting that to be serendipitous is, largely, to be lucky. From a research perspective, we need to deconstruct and operationalize the terminology so that we recognize the phenomena that we are investigating. For greater clarity, we look instead to how serendipity is deployed by those who research it.
For an incident to be described as serendipitous, or for an outcome to claim to be serendipity, it will have the following five conditions:
1. There is an observation that is unanticipated, anomalous, unexpected, unpredictable, or inconsistent with existing findings or theories. This is a core condition and is generally agreed on by all who have researched serendipity (see, for example, Danzico, 2010; Foster and Ford, 2003; Makri and Blandford, 2012; McCay-Peet and Toms, 2015; Merton and Barber, 2004; Toms, 1997). But it is not the only characteristic. Many discussions of serendipity stop here, but in doing so interpret serendipity as simply synonymous with surprises and apparently happy random accidents; “without an element of chance, ‘discovery’ is nothing more than verification; without sagacity, it is mere happenstance” (Arvo, 1999, p. 183).