The production of ‘context’ in information seeking research: a metatheoretical view

Talja, Sanna; Keso, Heidi; Pietiläinen, Tarja

doi:10.1016/s0306-4573(99)00024-2

Cited by 157 publications

(116 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…The third sense refers to the ways in which the same world can be viewed differently given interpretive assumptions. Talja, Keso, and Pietiläinen (1999) described two approaches to context: the objectified and the interpretative. The main difference between them is that context in the objectified approach is evoked and described philosophically and theoretically while context in the interpretative approach is not understood as an independent entity but rather as a carrier of meaning.…”

Section: Situation and Context Of Information Seekingmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the Web at home: Information seeking and Web searching in the home environment

Rieh

2004

J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci.

138

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As more people gain at-home access to the Internet, information seeking on the Web has become embedded in everyday life. The objective of this study was to characterize the home as an information use environment and to identify a range of information seeking and Websearch behaviors at home. Twelve Northern California residents were recruited, and the data were collected through semi-structured at-home interviews based on a self-reported Search Activities Diary that subjects kept over a 3-5 day period. The data were analyzed on four levels: home environment, information seeking goals, information retrieval interaction, and search query. Findings indicated that the home, indeed, provided a distinct information use environment beyond physical setting alone in which the subjects used the Web for diverse purposes and interests. Based on the findings, the relationships among home environment, Web context, and interaction situation were identified with respect to user goals and information-seeking behaviors.

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Section: Situation and Context Of Information Seekingmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the Web at home: Information seeking and Web searching in the home environment

Rieh

2004

J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci.

138

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“…D. Johnson, 2003;Talja, Keso, & Pietilainen, 1999). The difficulty of deriving testable hypotheses from these models means that they have had little direct impact on the design of retrieval systems, despite the fact that they have had a major impact on our understanding of how people interact with IR systems.…”

Section: User-centred Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploiting task-document relations in support of information retrieval in the workplace

Freund

2008

SIGIR Forum

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Increasingly, workplace information seeking takes place in digital information environments and is reliant upon search systems. Existing systems are designed to retrieve information that is relevant to the query, but are not capable of identifying information that is well-suited to the context and situation of a search. This is a problem for professionals who often are searching for a small amount of useful information that can be applied to a problem or task, and have limited time to browse through large sets of results. This inability of search systems to discriminate between relevant and useful documents is one of the core problems in information retrieval.In this dissertation, I address this problem by studying the role that contextual factors play in determining how a group of professionals searches for and selects information. The central question concerns the nature of the relationships between these contextual factors, specifically between the genres in the document collection and the tasks of the searcher, with an aim to exploit such relationships to improve workplace information retrieval. Research was conducted through multiple studies in three phases, moving from an exploratory study of workplace information behaviour to a controlled experimental user study.Findings confirm that workplace context shapes search behaviour. This relationship is modeled as a set of key contextual factors and sets of context-dependent access constraints, preferred document characteristics, and search strategies. Among the contextual factors identified, work ii tasks and information tasks were found to be significantly associated with document genres. This task-genre relationship was modeled as a matrix of associations between domain-specific task and genre taxonomies and successfully implemented as a filtering component in a workplace search system. This is the first major study of the relationship between task and genre in information seeking and of its application to information retrieval systems.iii AcknowledgementsThis document has been a long time coming and many people have helped me along the path to its completion. First among these are my wonderful children, Alon, Jonathan, Gabriel and Ethan, who, despite the injustice of having to grow up with a mother who never seemed to be able to finish her homework, have consistently cheered me on and always provided hugs when needed. A great debt of thanks is also owed to my partner of many years, Amir, who encouraged me to take on this project, and who has supported our family through my many years as a student.

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“…These approaches are based on different epistemological claims concerning how information needs and relevance should be defined, and they include different views on instrumentality. The three approaches can be labeled as metatheories, and have as such been described in LIS research literature [6], [7], [8], [cf. 9].…”

Section: Three Approaches To Information Needs Relevance and Instrummentioning

confidence: 99%

The Instrumentality of Information Needs and Relevance

Sundin

Johannisson

2005

Context: Nature, Impact, and Role

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Abstract. An important question in Library and Information Science (LIS) isfor what purpose information is sought; information seeking is not carried out for its own sake but to achieve an objective that lies beyond the practice of information seeking itself. Therefore, instrumentality could be seen as an overarching principle in the LIS field. Three different epistemological approaches to information needs and relevance, and the views on instrumentality that goes with them, are presented: the structure approach, the individual approach and the communication approach. The aim of the paper is to show how a communication oriented, neo-pragmatist epistemology enables research that in a dialogic manner highlights both the social contexts that information users are part of, and positions users as active contributors to the shaping of these contexts. The power relations that permeate these processes of negotiation between users and contexts are highlighted by introducing a Foucauldian perspective on power.

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The production of ‘context’ in information seeking research: a metatheoretical view

Cited by 157 publications

References 11 publications

On the Web at home: Information seeking and Web searching in the home environment

On the Web at home: Information seeking and Web searching in the home environment

Exploiting task-document relations in support of information retrieval in the workplace

The Instrumentality of Information Needs and Relevance

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