Feeling documents: toward a phenomenology of information seeking
| Published date | 14 May 2018 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-09-2016-0113 |
| Pages | 462-489 |
| Date | 14 May 2018 |
| Author | Patrick Keilty,Gregory Leazer |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Records management & preservation,Document management,Classification & cataloguing,Information behaviour & retrieval,Collection building & management,Scholarly communications/publishing,Information & knowledge management,Information management & governance,Information management,Information & communications technology,Internet |
Feeling documents: toward
a phenomenology of
information seeking
Patrick Keilty
Faculty of Information, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada, and
Gregory Leazer
Department of Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles,
California, USA
Abstract
Purpose –The purpose of this paper is to present two models of human cognition. The first narrow model
concentrates on the mind as an information-processing apparatus, and interactions with information as
altering thought structures and filling gaps in knowledge. A second model incorporates elements of
unconsciousness, embodiment and affect. The selection of one model over the other, often done tacitly, has
consequences for subsequent models of information seeking and use.
Design/methodology/approach –A close reading of embodied engagements with pornography guided by
existential phenomenology.
Findings –The paper develops a phenome nology of information seeking, centered primarily around the
work of Merleau-Ponty, tojus tify a more expansive concept of c ognition. The authors demons trate the roles
of affect and embodiment in document assessment and use, with a prolonged example in the realm of
browsing pornography.
Originality/value –Models of information seeking and use need to account for diverse kinds of human-
document interaction, to include documents such as music, film and comics that engage the emotions or are
perceived through a broader band of sensory experience to include visual and auditory components.
The authors consider how those human-document engagements form virtual communities based on the
similarity of their members’affective and embodied responses, which in turn inform the arrangements,
through algorithms, of the relations of documents to each other. Less instrumental forms of information
seeking and use –ones that incorporate elements of embodiment and affect –are characterized as esthetic
experiences, following the definition of the esthetic provided by Dewey. Ultimately the authors consider,
given the ubiquity of information seeking and its rhythm in everyday life, whether we can meaningfully
characterize information seeking as a distinct human process.
Keywords Information retrieval, Computers, Aesthetics, Information seeking, Affect, Desire, Pornography
Paper type Research paper
How do people seek information, particularly in information systems, whether analog, digital,
personal and/or institutional? How do people evaluate documents –either the documents
themselves or representational surrogates in various kinds of retrieval systems –in their
consideration of what to read, view or listen, and in their subsequent use? What are the
consequences in the design of information systems based on these practices?
These questions have long been at the heart of the field of information, media and
literary studies. While researchers within information studies have properly identified
the significance of the process of seeking information –especially documents
(Savolainen, 2008; Case, 2012; Fidel, 2012), there has been a corresponding failure to
consider the full range of the ways people evaluate and select documents. There has been
a similar failure to consider the full variety of ways people interact with documents, which
has been the strength of media and literary studies, particularly the way these interactions
shape the performance and use of information retrieval (IR) systems. In particular, we find
the information-seeking and use literature in information studies to be unduly concerned
Journal of Documentation
Vol. 74 No. 3, 2018
pp. 462-489
© Emerald PublishingLimited
0022-0418
DOI 10.1108/JD-09-2016-0113
Received 28 September 2016
Revised 4 May 2017
Accepted 15 May 2017
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0022-0418.htm
462
JD
74,3
with a restricted notion of cognition, to the detriment of the embodied and affective
responses of people when they use documents.
The theories of Merleau-Ponty and contemporary work in cognitive studies have led
to a series of propositions regarding the mind. These propositions emphasize the roles
of perception, embodiment, unconsciousness, intuition and affect in mental function.
Varela et al. (1993), Lakoff and Johnson (1999) and Damasio (2008) give good introductions.
These ideas are well understood by now, and in general circulation. However, they have not
been fully explored within the contexts of IR or knowledge organization specifically or in
information studies generally.
The cognitive turn in information studies, initiated roughly in the mid-1970s with the
work of Brookes (1975, 1980), Belkin et al. (1982) and Belkin (1990), marked greater insights
in both studies of information seeking and in IR. That work made explicit the cognitive
nature of the exchange in a wide variety of human-document and human-information
system interactions. Although a diverse body of work prefigured and aligned itself with the
cognitive turn, including the professional training of librarians, we can view the interest in
cognition as the consequence of an interest in how humans interact with information, and as
the refutation of a purely technological view of information, a position strongly associated
with the work of Claude Shannon.
What then is meant by cognition? Although the cognitive turn places people as a central
concern in information studies, we find that there is generally little theorizing within the
field for this essential concept. The cognitive turn in information studies can perhaps be best
summed up in a single statement, by Brookes (1980, p. 131), expressing the relationship
between knowledge and information:
Some years ago I expressed this relationship by what I called the “fundamental equation”
[of information science]:
KS
½
þDI¼KSþDS
½
which states in its very general way that the knowledge structure K[S] is changed to the new
modified structureK[S+ΔS] by the information ΔI,theΔSindicating theeffect of the modification.
Brookes himself spends relatively little time expanding the concepts of knowledge or
cognition and instead develops the concept of information. Though no particular fault of his,
the degree to which an individual’s knowledge has stood in for cognition generally in the
information-seeking literature is remarkable. In the absence of a theory of cognition, the field
has resorted to fairly simplistic notions, with unfortunate consequences for the way we
think about information, documentation and information systems. The common notion of
cognition is simplistic in three ways: first, it posits a mechanistic relationship between
information and cognition; second, it conflates cognition with consciousness’procedural and
propositional content; and third, it focuses on the individual without consideration of the
social and cultural dimensions of cognition.
Information and cognition
Brookes casts two fundamental phenomena into relationship with each other: cognition and
information. Before and since the cognitive turn, we have spent significant effort trying to
describe the eponymous phenomenon of “information science/studies,”a quest spent in part
to help define the field itself, including its areas of research, degree programs and curricula.
For a review of this work, the reader is referred to the work of Buckland (1991) and
Furner (2010) (3 Information pieces).
According to the cognitive model, information is both commonly understood to be the
thing that changes a cognitive state, and also as the subjective knowledge that we all carry
around in our heads. The latter is the approach characterized, though not necessarily
463
Phenomenology
of information
seeking
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