Music questions in social Q&A: an analysis of Yahoo! Answers
| Date | 11 September 2017 |
| Pages | 992-1009 |
| Published date | 11 September 2017 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-02-2017-0024 |
| Author | Morten Hertzum,Pia Borlund |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Records management & preservation,Document management,Classification & cataloguing,Information behaviour & retrieval,Collection building & management,Scholarly communications/publishing,Information & knowledge management,Information management & governance,Information management,Information & communications technology,Internet |
Music questions in social Q&A:
an analysis of Yahoo! Answers
Morten Hertzum and Pia Borlund
University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark
Abstract
Purpose –Social question and answer (social Q&A) sites have become a popular tool for obtaining music
information. The purpose of this paper is to investigate what users ask about, what experience the questions
convey, and how users specify their questions.
Design/methodology/approach –A total of 3,897 music questions from the social Q&A site Yahoo!
Answers were categorized according to their question type, user experience, and question specification.
Findings –The music questions were diverse with (dis)approval (42 percent), factual (21 percent), and advice
(15 percent) questions as the most frequent types. Advice questions were the longest and roughly twice as
long as (dis)approval and factual questions. The user experience associated with the questions was most often
pragmatic (24 percent) or senso-emotional (12 percent). Pragmatic questions were typically about the user’s
own performance of music, while senso-emotional questions were about finding music for listening. Notably,
half of the questions did not convey information about the user experience but the absence of such
information did not reduce the number of answers. In specifying the questions, the most frequent information
was about the music context and the user context.
Research limitations/implications –This study suggests a division of labor between social Q&A sites
and search engines for music information retrieval. It should be noted that the study is restricted to one social
Q&A site.
Originality/value –Social Q&A sites provide an opportunity for studying what information real users seek
about music and what information they specify to retrieve it, thereby elucidating the role of social Q&A in
music information seeking.
Keywords Information searches, Information seeking, Information science, Information behaviour,
Music information retrieval, Social Q&A
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
Throughout the world people listen to, play, and otherwise take an interest in music to
convey feelings, celebrate events, commemorate persons, create an atmosphere, state a
protest, make a living, accompany other activities, and so forth. The multiple uses of
music make music information seeking a diverse activity that is pursued using different
tools. One of these tools is social question and answer (social Q&A) sites. While research
on music information retrieval has mainly addressed the automatic extraction of features
from music files to make these features available for retrieval (Burgoyne et al., 2016;
Schedl et al., 2014), social Q&A sites provide an opportunity for studying what
information real users seek and what information they specify to retrieve it. Such studies
are necessary to understand the match between real information needs and the features
that can be automatically extracted from music files and to investigate the role of social
Q&A in music information seeking. Several studies have stressed the need for more
research on how real users seek and retrieve music information (e.g. Futrelle and Downie,
2003; Lee and Cunningham, 2013).
Social Q&A (or community Q&A) leverages the time and effort of everyday users to
answer questions (Gazan, 2011). Once a question has been posted any user can answer it.
Journal of Documentation
Vol. 73 No. 5, 2017
pp. 992-1009
© Emerald PublishingLimited
0022-0418
DOI 10.1108/JD-02-2017-0024
Received 23 February 2017
Revised 22 May 2017
Accepted 2 June 2017
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0022-0418.htm
This study was conducted in the context of the CoSound project, which was co-funded by Innovation
Fund Denmark(Grant No. 0603-00475B). Thefunding source had no role in how thestudy was designed,
conducted, reported,or published. Stavris Solo downloaded the musicquestions from Yahoo! Answers.
992
JD
73,5
In this study we target Yahoo! Answers, which is similar to other social Q&A sites such as
Answerbag and Quora but differs from ask-an-expert sites on which questions are
answered by specialists, often for a fee. Due to the large amount of traffic on Yahoo!
Answers, questions often receive multiple answers within a short period of time but also
quickly disappear in the flood of new questions (Harper et al., 2008). The design of the site
encourages users to browse questions by category, one of which concerns music. On the
basis of manually categorizing 3,897 music questions on Yahoo! Answers we analyze
the types of music questions users ask, the user experience conveyed in the questions, and
the information supplied in specifying the questions. We supplement the categorization of
the questions with information about their length and the number of answers. This
information provides surrogate indicators of the amount of detail in the specification of the
question and the amount of interest in the question from the user community, respectively.
Research on the seeking and retrieval of music information was sporadic until the late 1990s
(Schedl et al., 2014), partly because the technologies underlying music information retrieval and
social Q&A are fairly recent. In the next section, we review related work in music information
retrieval and social Q&A. We start this review by inserting music in an everyday-life context
because the music questions we analyze predominantly arise from the users’everyday lives, as
opposed to their professional careers. Then we describe the method we used in collecting and
analyzing the data from Yahoo! Answers. To bolster the quality of the analysis we adopted an
existing taxonomy (Harper et al., 2010) for the categorization of question types, slightly adapted
a taxonomy of the customer experience (Gentile et al., 2007) to fit it to the user experience of
music information retrieval, and devised our categorization of the information supplied in
specifying the questions on the basis of existing empirical studies (e.g. Lee, 2010). In the
remainder of the paper we first present the results of the analysis and then discuss the results in
relation to other work on music information retrieval and social Q&A.
2. Related work
The following review covers research on how users seek and retrieve music information.
Lee (2010, p. 1025) notes that without a rich understanding of user needs and behaviors, research
on music information retrieval runs the risk of developing “ill-suited systems for the users”and of
remaining “weak on evaluation and application to real users.”Thus, user studies are important.
2.1 Uses of music in everyday life
A consistent finding in studies of the uses ofmusicineverydaylifeisthatpeople
consciously and actively use music as a resource and that their use of music differs across
contexts (e.g. North et al., 2004; Sloboda et al., 2001). Music is rarely the main task in which
people engage; rather they use music as accompaniment to other activities such as eating,
exercising, homework, housework, and transport. DeNora (1999) found that people often
used music to align themselves with the mental state appropriate for carrying out
different tasks and exhibited considerable awareness of which music was effective for
which tasks. Music has the capacity to change people’s mood and they mostly exploit this
capacity by listening to music that makes them more positive, aroused, and attentive
(e.g. Sloboda et al., 2001). North et al. (2004) found that their respondents’reasons for
listening to music were most often context-specific. For example, “it helped me to pass th e
time”was a frequent reason when respondents were on their own, at work, or with
strangers. Conversely, “it helped to create the right atmosphere”was a frequent reason
when they were with th eir boyfriend or gir lfriend. Preferences for different music genres
have not just been linked to different contexts but also to more stable factors such as
personality (Rentfrow and Gosling, 2003) and social status (van Eijck, 2001). For example,
Rentfrow and Gosling (2003) found that people who enjoyed energetic and rhythmic music
(i.e. rap and hip-hop, soul/funk, and electronica/dance) tended to reject conservative ideals,
993
Music
questions in
social Q&A
To continue reading
Request your trial