Interview transcripts: Brett Binst, Lien Michiels, and Annelien Smets (2025). What Is Serendipity? An Interview Study to Conceptualize Experienced Serendipity in Recommender Systems. In Proceedings of the 33rd ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (UMAP '25)

In this repository we provide the interview transcripts on which we based “Brett Binst, Lien Michiels, and Annelien Smets. 2025. What Is Serendipity? An Interview Study to Conceptualize Experienced Serendipity in Recommender Systems. In 33rd ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (UMAP ’25), June 16–19, 2025, New York City, NY, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 10 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3699682.3728325”

Small talk not related to the research topic, information that make the respondents identifiable, and sensitive information about the respondents are removed from the transcripts. Afterwards, the interviews have been translated to English, since they were originally done in Dutch. We have translated the interviews with the help of ChatGPT 4o. We turned off the “Improve the model for everyone” option. All translations have been carefully proofread and compared to the original transcript in order to guarantee a translation that remains authentic to the original interview.

All respondents also gave their informed consent for publishing these interview transcripts on Zenodo.