Search and serendipity: Teaching Digital Humanities students how to catch serendipity and information encountering in digital search environments

How often do you search and browse information online and by chance find something you did not even think you were looking for but that you find useful, inspiring, or surprising? This kind of information encountering (Erdelez & Makri, 2020) is at the basis of my talk. I will present the details of a pedagogical practise that taught master students of the Digital Humanities (DH) programme at the University of Groningen how to research their peers’ experiences of serendipitous information encountering as they explored a large digital audio-visual archive for materials to create audio-visual stories.