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Information Encountering: A Conceptual Framework for Accidental Information Discovery
... However, Wilson [1] only accounts for when one has a known information need. Erdelez [34] extended the information behavior theories to encompass the processing of information that one was not actively seeking, termed information encountering. This concept allows for the exploration of the use of technologies in an information-saturated environment [34][35][36]. ...
... Erdelez [34] extended the information behavior theories to encompass the processing of information that one was not actively seeking, termed information encountering. This concept allows for the exploration of the use of technologies in an information-saturated environment [34][35][36]. ...
... The Wilson [1] model remains relevant, as seen in participant responses first in their expression of unmet information needs (ie, information types), which led to information seeking on the internet, and in their insight into how the environment in which they sought information can influence their behavior (ie, information-related concerns), and finally in how they used information (ie, information outcomes). However, participants often learned what questions they should ask related to pregnancy loss in these internet-based spaces, which is a form of information encountering [34]. The internet, as an information-rich environment, is a source for both active information seeking and information encountering, which can occur through browsing or as a part of active seeking. ...
Background:
Information behavior describes all human behaviors in relation to information. Individuals experiencing disruption or stigma often use internet-based tools and spaces to meet their associated information needs. One such context is pregnancy loss, which, although impactful and common, has been absent from much of feminist and reproductive health and information behavior scholarship. By understanding information behavior after pregnancy loss and accounting for it in designing internet-based information spaces, we can take a meaningful step toward countering the stigma and silence that many who experience such loss endure, facilitate coping, and make space for diverse pregnancy narratives in our society.
Objective:
This study's objective is to provide a characterization of internet-based information behavior after pregnancy loss.
Methods:
We examined internet-based information behavior after pregnancy loss through 9 in-depth interviews with individuals residing in the United States. We analyzed the data by using open and axial coding.
Results:
We identified the following three themes in relation to participants' information behavior in internet-based spaces: needed information types, information-related concerns, and information outcomes. We drew from information behavior frameworks to interpret the processes and concerns described by participants as they moved from recognizing information needs to searching for information and to using information and experiencing outcomes. Specifically, we aligned these themes with information use concepts from the information behavior literature-information search, knowledge construction, information production, information application, and information effects. Participants' main concerns centered on being able to easily find information (ie, searchability), particularly on topics that had already been covered (ie, persistence), and, once found, being able to assess the information for its relevance, helpfulness, and credibility (ie, assessability). We suggest the following design implications that support health information behavior: assessability, persistence, and searchability.
Conclusions:
We examined internet-based information behavior in the context of pregnancy loss, an important yet silenced reproductive health experience. Owing to the prevalence of information seeking during pregnancy, we advocate that generic pregnancy-related information spaces should address the needs related to pregnancy loss that we identified in addition to spaces dedicated to pregnancy loss. Such a shift could not only support those who use these spaces to manage pregnancies and then experience a loss but also help combat the silence and stigma associated with loss and the linear and normative narrative by which pregnancies are often represented.
... For some people being serendipity-prone is an integrated and valued part of their identity (Erdelez, 1997;Makri and Blandford, 2012b). Others, again, cannot recall serendipity ever occurring (Erdelez, 1997(Erdelez, , 1999 or do not believe in it (Dantonio, 2010). ...
... For some people being serendipity-prone is an integrated and valued part of their identity (Erdelez, 1997;Makri and Blandford, 2012b). Others, again, cannot recall serendipity ever occurring (Erdelez, 1997(Erdelez, , 1999 or do not believe in it (Dantonio, 2010). Serendipity as an experience also contains a strong element of subjectivity (Makri and Blandford, 2012b). ...
... It has been found that people vary in their ability to seize the moment and recognise opportunities (Shane et al., 2010). When some people encounter useful information, they stop their current task and switch their attention towards the find, while others remain focused on the task (Erdelez, 1997). This willingness may be enhanced by positive emotionality while being in a bad mood, stressed, tired or pressured with time would rather hinder it (Dantonio, 2010;Jiang, et al., 2015;Makri and Blandford, 2012b;McBirnie, 2008;Zhou et al., 2018). ...
Introduction. Individual differences have long been said to influence serendipity. Empirically, however, robust evidence is lacking for this connection. This study addressed this research gap by linking serendipity to personality traits and sense of coherence. Method. Data from 140 respondents was collected by an online survey. The survey measured the five-factor model personality traits, sense of coherence and serendipitously found useful and interesting information. Analysis. The data was analysed by a general linear model regression analysis. Results. Only 7% of variance of serendipity/usefulness and 10% of serendipity/interest could be explained by personality and sense of coherence. Usefulness was linked to sense of coherence (low comprehensibility), while interest was linked to personality (extraversion, agreeableness and low negative emotionality). Conclusions. Individual differences in serendipity was found both related to a negative cognitive experience of information chaos and a positive affective-behavioural experience of discovery. Lack of control over the information flow could lead to a sense that acquisition of useful information is governed by chance rather than conscious efforts. Activity, social connectedness and positive emotionality, in turn, would increase the likelihood to discover interesting information.
... People grab answers when and where they can, often not remembering where [87]. * Erdelez [95] emphasized and documented the idea of information encountering -that much information finding is accidental. * Wilson, Ford, Ellis, Foster & Spink [248] called for focusing on uncertainty as a primary construct for studying information seeking and use, and looking at its role in personal orientations, in information, in situations, and in process. ...
... * Limberg [138] proposed an approach termed "phenomenography" and compared its potential utilities to other approaches. * Erdelez [95], Erdelez & Rioux [96] focused on accidental discovery of information. Toms [227] focused on browsing as a mode of information seeking. ...
This paper summarizes what is known about everyday health information seeking and use, as supported by empirical research largely conducted during the 1980s and 1990’s. It draws implications for research and system design applicable to the U.S. National Library of Medicine’s (NLM) MedlinePlus web portal and data base of consumer health information. Its focus is on the two academic disciplines that bear most directly on information seeking and use, each with different perspectives. Communication (COMM) whose orientation is the study of messaging and the effective transmission of information, and Library and Information Science (LIS) whose focus is on meeting user information needs. Although there is very little overlapping literature, Dr. Dervin’s career was spent working across these two research genres. She is known most prominently for her Sense-Making Methodology. Dr. Dervin supports the view that there are more commonalities than differences between the two disciplines, and that research focusing on the commonalities provides a better opportunity for accounting for more variance in human information seeking than the highly compartmentalized approaches that dominate the study of information seeking. Dr. Dervin’s first-person review of these literatures was commissioned by NLM in 2001. It remains relevant today both for its critical insights, and as an historical resource. It is published posthumously in 2023 in tribute to Dr. Dervin on her recent passing.
... Serendipity is closely related to exploration and has been aptly described as the contrary of "problem-solving information", for which "individuals must experience a 'problem situation'" (Ross 1999: 784). Already possessed of a distinguished socio-historical pedigree (Merton & Barber 2004;Eco 1998), the advent of the World Wide Web (a name itself conveying the image of a spider waiting to see what chance will deliver to its encyclopedic net) has seen considerable attention paid to the concept of serendipity, for search engines in particular, and as a scientific method in general, as reflected in the hundreds of articles on the subject (Erdelez et al. 1997) and its status as a compelling topic for popular science books (Roberts 1989;Hofmann 2013). In the realm of household technologies, it is among the endearing idiosyncrasies of Apple's voice-operated digital agent Siri and her text-based ancestor Eliza, the make-believe psychoanalytical chatbot of the 1960s (Wikipedia: "Siri"; Weizenbaum 1966; Wikipedia: "ELIZA"). ...
... The Document City in Figure A1 demonstrates the salient characteristics of serendipity: detection of abnormality (tall or eccentric Document Towers), sensitivity of the observer to the recognition of valuable objects (awareness of quality and costs of OCR-ed documents), reactivity to and acting upon opportunities (use of the visualization to illustrate this article), an incubation process leading to value recognition (the interpretation of the visualization), utility (correcting misclassification), an unplannable process, unexpected findings, and results that are not guaranteed. Current research is concerned with better understanding serendipity through empirical and theoretical studies (Erdelez 1997), developing methods to induce serendipity (Erdelez 2004;Campos & de Figueiredo 2002), measure serendipity ( Document-centered technologies generally use the selection and ranking of text content to create serendipity, rather than letting it emerge spontaneously from the data, as occurs under the Document Towers paradigm (Cooper & Prager 2000). The "Bohemian Bookshelf " is an example of an interface designed for serendipitous book discoveries that explicitly takes advantage of physical aspects (cover color and number of pages), in addition to content information (authors, keywords, and timelines) (Thud, Hinrichs & Carpendale 2012). ...
This article argues in favor of representing the spatial distribution of information within and between documents, by surveying a broad variety of potential applications, including the entire document lifecycle, multiple sensory modalities, and a large spectrum of tasks and users. The theoretical explanations of this richness are a further facet of the article, and can be summarized as follows: (1) insights emerge from focusing on information structure, rather than information meaning; (2) spatializing information creates new information; (3) simplification increases the polyvalence of representation models; (4) introducing mystery in communication channels motivates discovery and diversifies insights; (5) approaching information design as a Gesamtkunstwerk multiplies the applications; (6) information is a manifestation of a link between structures and the actions these enable, while information design is the art and science of creating such links. The argument is developed around the concrete example of a document structure visualization, the Document Towers, which uses the metaphor of architectural models to represent documents.
... Foster and Ford (2003) focus on the behaviour of the information seeker, and the personal characteristics of people who appear to be good at serendipitous discoveries. They cite earlier work by Erdelez (1996) on "information encountering", in which she identifies people who seem to be "super-encounterers" (later updated in Erdelez 2004, see also Erdelez, Chap. 12 of this volume). ...
Toby Burrows and Deb Verhoeven return to Walpole’s original story of the Three Princes of Serendip to remind us that aside from sagacity, it is the various places that the princes travel to that afford serendipity. Consequently, they contemplate the idea that serendipity might be more than a mere passive source for finding the unsought. The design of physical objects and spaces can either afford values or undermine them. Burrows and Verhoeven investigate whether and how the value of serendipity has been realized –consciously or unconsciously—in the structures and designs of libraries and other physical collections. The ways in which such physical spaces afford serendipity is highly diverse. Libraries’ fostering of serendipity is at least commonly assumed to be more pronounced than in virtual spaces, where the guiding design principle seems to be efficiency, or quickly finding what one seeks. This serves Burrows and Verhoeven as a backdrop to investigate whether virtual spaces can possibly foster serendipity to the same degree as physical spaces. In the end, Burrows and Verhoeven plea for a diminished focus on efficiency and a return to the foundational story of serendipity to guide the design of virtual search engines in the future.
... Some of this information they did not know they needed until they heard or read it." (see Williamson 1998, p. 24 andErdelez 1997). 8 In describing her result that incidental information was more common than purposeful information acquisition in her study, Williamson states: "Sometimes the mass media were used purposefully, for example, to look up cinema times. ...
We study how accuracy and commonality of information affect the incentives of agents who voluntarily participate in collective action. Our focus is on the interaction of information and individual efforts’ complementarity. We use a private provision of a public good model that captures high complementarity through the weakest-link technology and low complementarity through the best-shot technology. Increases in the accuracy of information lead to more dispersion of individual contributions and increases (decreases) in expected provision if complementarity is low (high). Increases in commonality raise (lower) all contributions if complementarity is high (low). We interpret our results in light of recent developments for information diffusion: if one takes the view that like-minded agents are now receiving information that is less accurate and more likely to be the same than in the past, then our model predicts increased success for activities with high complementarity such as protests, and a negative effect on the development of new ideas, such as slogans or “memes,” activities that by and large depend on the best individual effort and so display low complementarity.
This paper is an examination of the information behaviors and habits of practising Pagans and ritual magicians. Aspects of information behavior relevant to contemporary Paganism are discussed, before features of Paganism that may affect information needs and use are presented. An online questionnaire covering the six areas of information needs, access, retrieval, quality, use and literacy was administered with 142 respondents, and five of those were subsequently interviewed at length, before the results were analyzed using an interpretivist methodology, with reference to existing information behavior models deemed relevant. The results present the beginning stages of a model of Pagan and Occult information behavior, showing seven sliding scales concerning issues practicing Pagans and ritual magicians face when engaging with information, on which each individual may have very different positions.
This work starts with a background study of serendipity, its meaning in the context of information discovery, its interrelation with bibliographic relationships, and the technical possibilities for practical implementation of a relationships based visual navigation in a library discovery interface to achieve serendipitous resource discovery. The methodology for developing the prototype consists of two components – theoretical base and practical steps. The theoretical framework includes an indepth study of the concept of bibliographic relationships as proposed by experts, as reflected in bibliographic data models and as included in bibliographic formats and metadata schemas. The practical sides deal with the application of the theoretical framework in designing a prototype that, in addition to other typical retrieval features, supports visual navigational facility driven by bibliographic relationships. The components, tools and standards of the entire software architecture are all open source and open standards.
This qualitative study explores the information behavior of newspaper reporters regarding their serendipitous encounters with information that lead to story ideas, and how newspaper editors affect reporters’ ability to pursue such encountered ideas. As an interdisciplinary examination in human information behavior and journalism studies, behaviors and routines emerged that encouraged and potentially limited certain behaviors and routines. The findings also identify behaviors wherein newspaper editors match reporters with certain traits to certain story assignments.
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