A brief review of context based models of information discovery

I chose Kirsty Williamson's article, the "Ecological Theory of Human Behavior" to pursue for this assignment. I paged through several other articles in the process and found that a large number of them discussed in detail an information interaction "searching, chaining, browsing, interpreting", or attempted to map cognitive/psychological perspectives onto the process. In contrast, Williamson's article and related citations (Bates - 2002, Erdelez - 1998) seemed to take a more comprehensive approach. Williamson's article caught my in particular because she differentiated herself from more cognitive approaches including Dervin/Nilam, Belkin, and Kulthau.

I read three articles related to Williamson's theme of opportunistic and contextual information interaction which she bases on Patrick Wilson who "suggested that people find information unexpectedly as they engage in other activities." (Williamson, 128) Bates' 2002 article on an 'Integrated model for information seeking' and Erdelez's article on 'Information Encountering' provided complimentary perspective to Williamson's views. I chose Williamson's article on her study of information interaction among an elderly population in Australia for a fuller review of her Information Ecology theory. Her study involved both quantitative and qualitative analyses of the information interaction of 202 people through the creation of a telephone diary and in-depth interviews of the participants. Williamson points out that she took effort to research the participants within their context (living spaces, social networks, demographics) and that she was able to generalize some information behavior traits from this process.

I found her observations regarding the information acquisition behavior interesting. In particular, Williamson found that significant pieces of information were obtained 'accidentally' through social networks, media browsing (newspaper, television, junk mail), and family relationships. In many cases, the primary purpose of the interaction was ultimately irrelevant to the information direction pursued, indicating a much less structured approach to information seeking than that addressed in other literature.

Erdelez's 1998 article in the Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science recounts her theory and research in the Information Encountering area. She groups 'information encounter' into four groups. Non-encounterers (people who do not recall an encounter), Occasional-encounterers (people who do not view IE significant or more than 'lucky'), Encounterers (people who recognize that they often IE, enjoy the experience but do not see connection between this and other info behavior), and Super-Encounterers (IE is an important component of information acquisition).

Based on Williamson's views, I thought that everyone should be a super-encounterer. It appears that in contrast to Williamson and Bates who emphasize the information seeking process in daily life, Erdelez is looking at the Information Encountering experience within the context of the directed search for information. Regardless, Erdelez discusses many of the same impacts as Williamson and Bates, lateral interest moves within an information seeking context, and cognitive and affective impacts of 'accidental' information discovery but differentiates information encountering from browsing/berry picking models that Bates & Williamson discuss.

Finally, Bates's 2002 article attempts to create a holistic approach to what she terms as the two approaches to user analysis literature (the Cognitive/affective and the biological/anthropological). Bates first focuses on the information seeking process. She states that her scope includes "all the information that comes to a human being during a lifetime " (3), and emphasizes that "For most people, most of the time, information-related behavior consists of absorbing and using the learning and information that comes our way during the course of our daily lives " (3). She continues with a brief discussion of the 4 modes of information seeking related to active/passive and directed/undirected searching (Searching (active/directed), Browsing, Monitoring, Being aware (passive undirected)).

Bates argues that based on the anthropological view of human existence, activities such as browsing, berry picking, and farming (a concept she explores in some depth) more accurately describe information discovery processes than more directed 'seeking' activities do. Bates uses concepts such as the principle of least effort and the idea of 'data enrichment' to discuss why individuals engage in 'farming' activities which build an informing context in which information is more easily obtained and incorporated into a personal information infrastructure. She concludes by naming the two sides of information seeking as sampling/selection and passive acquisition and argues that each approach considered (scientific, cognitive, social, anthropological) contributes a valuable component to the understanding of the process.

Within the context of the discussion of information seeking, I found Bates’s and Williamson’s remarks on the fluid nature of information seeking interesting. Both commented on the role that categorization played in the process and the problems that highly structured information systems introduce into these relatively unstructured/undirected seeking experiences. Bates asks "What happens when this propensity encounters the complex structures of libraries, classifications, metadata, and so on?" (9). She suggests that these highly organized systems are incompatible with the natural information seeking process which emphasizes browsing/berry picking/serendipity. In contrast, Williamson, in her overview article (reporting the findings of her research on information use of a breast cancer website) comments on the ability of the site to direct specific information to users based on their 'ecological' attributes: "information is being 'tailored' to user needs through a portal – by the provision of 'user-centric' resource descriptions and a metadata repository that links the self-selected profiles with specific information resources" (131).

A common theme in each of the articles included questions regarding the impact of technology on this process. While Erdelez found that 'Super-Encounters' avoided online resources in 1998, Williamson reported a lag in technology adoption for elderly populations in 2002, and Bates questions the use of structured systems in information interactions, all three mention the trend towards lower-cost information interaction that the web brings to these studies. In some senses, the web is based on the 'accidental discovery' model proposed in the above papers. The use of 'links' and user centered publishing models brings community participation to the fore-front where the previous studies could only analyze personal interactions on a small scale (person to person, person to mass-media component).


Works Cited

Bates, Marcia. 2002. Towards an Integrated Model of Information Seeking. In The Fourth International Conference on Information Needs, Seeking and Use in Different Contexts. Lisbon, Portugal.

Erdelez, S. 1999. Information Encountering: Its more than just bumping into information. Bulletin of the American Soiety for Information Science 25 (3).

Williamson, Kirsty. 1998. Discovered by chance: The role of incidental information acquisition in an ecological model of information use. Library & Information Science Research 20 (1):23

Williamson, Kirsty. 2006. Ecologoical Theory of Human Information Behavior. In Theories of Information Behavior, edited by K. E. Fisher, S. Erdelez and L. McKechnie, E.F. Medford, NJ: Informtion Today.