Making and taking information

Abstract

Information behavior theory covers different aspects of the totality of information-related human behavior rather unevenly. The transitions or trading zones between different types of information activities have remained perhaps especially under-theorized. This article interrogates and expands a conceptual apparatus of information making and information taking as a pair of substantial concepts for explaining, in part, the mobility of information in terms of doing that unfolds as a process of becoming rather than of being, and in part, what is happening when information comes into being and when something is taken up for use as information. Besides providing an apparatus to describe the nexus of information provision and acquisition, a closer consideration of the parallel doings opens opportunities to enrich the inquiry of the conditions and practice of information seeking, appropriation, discovery, and retrieval as modes taking, and learning and information use as its posterities. | INTRODUCTIONConsidering the principal consensus on that information behavior (IB) covers the "totality of human behavior in relation to sources and channels of information, including both active and passive information seeking, and information use" (Wilson, 2000), the attention of information science research to the individual parts of that totality has been unevenly distributed (Case & Given, 2016). Much of earlier empirical research and many of the popular theories (Robinson, 2009) alike focus on information seeking whereas other areas, perhaps, in particular, information use (Savolainen, 2009), have remained both under-theorized and under-researched. In parallel, there has been a comparable, relative dearth of theorizing and models that would account for junctures between behaviors that account for the manipulation of information, for instance, by creation, organizing and managing, and its use. Earlier studies refer to "information creation and use" and how they are dynamically related to each other (Huuskonen, 2014) but seldom theorize this nexus in detail. This and other junctures are subsumed in some models that describe spaces and places (

Information sculpting

“…Information sculpting, like information foraging which also works on a principle of approximations, is best at describing our interactions with information in cases where creating information solutions is sufficiently complex or unfamiliar that we need to employ a series of information behaviors, evaluate solutions as they develop to gauge if we are developing a good solution, and where there is some recognizable endpoint that we can describe as a solution. This view blends with a view of information and information objects as being made or crafted (Huvila, 2022) and that information use is emergent and experimental (Hertzum, 2023).…”

Information shaping

“…Taking a shaping perspective on information use emphasizes how we work with information. In doing so, it foregrounds notions of making information and information solutions (Huvila, 2022), and activities such as crafting or bricolage (Lea French & Williamson, 2016) by which information solutions come into being. Shaping also emphasizes perception, enacted cognition, and the materiality of information use, aligning with new ideas on the sensuality of information work (Keilty & Leazer, 2018).…”

Information seeking by experimentation: Trying something out to discover what happens

“…Document sources are interpersonal in the sense that they make information created and recorded by others available to the seeker. However, it is still up to the seeker to see the relevance of the information, comprehend it, and apply it (e.g., Huvila, 2022). People sources provide access to information created by others and kept in their head as opposed to externally recorded.…”

“…Yet, the research on information behavior tends to bypass experimentation in favor of a focus on how people seek information in documents and by asking other people (Case & Given, 2016;Fisher & Julien, 2009;Hertzum, 2014;Willson et al, 2022). This article contends that information-behavior research would benefit from attending to experimentation because it is a widespread information-seeking practice and because it extends previous studies on the interrelations between creating and seeking information (Brown & Duguid, 1996;Cole, 1997;Huvila, 2022;Willson, 2022).…”