Comparing methods for finding search sessions on a specified topic: A double case study

Users searching for different topics in a collection may show distinct search patterns. To analyze search behavior of users searching for a specific topic, we need to retrieve the sessions containing this topic. In this paper, we compare different topic representations and approaches to find topic-specific sessions. We conduct our research in a double case study of two topics, World War II and feminism, using search logs of a historical newspaper collection. We evaluate the results using manually created ground truths of over 600 sessions per topic. The two case studies show similar results: The query-based methods yield high precision, at the expense of recall. The document-based methods find more sessions, at the expense of precision. In both approaches, precision improves significantly by manually curating the topic representations. This study demonstrates how different methods to find sessions containing specific topics can be applied by digital humanities scholars and practitioners.