Geographies of information behaviour: a conceptual exploration
| Date | 02 September 2021 |
| Pages | 745-760 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-05-2021-0105 |
| Published date | 02 September 2021 |
| 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 |
| Author | Andrew Cox,Crystal Fulton |
Geographies of information
behaviour:
a conceptual exploration
Andrew Cox
Information School, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK, and
Crystal Fulton
School of Information and Communication Studies, University College Dublin,
Dublin, Ireland
Abstract
Purpose –This article examines the relation between place, space and information behaviour.
Design/methodology/approach –Concepts of place and space are explored through a comparison of three
leisure pursuits: running, urban exploration and genealogy, based on the authors’research and the published
literature.
Findings –A socially constructed meaning of place is central to each leisure activity but how it is experienced
physically, emotionally and imaginatively are different. Places have very different meanings within each
practice. Mirroring this, information behaviours are also very different: such as the sources used, the type of
information created and how it is shared or not shared. Information behaviour contributes to the meanings
associated with place in particular social practices.
Research limitations/implications –Meaning attached to place can be understood as actively constructed
within social practices. Rather than context for information behaviours in the sense of an outside, containing,
even constraining, environment, the meaning of place can be seen as actively constructed within social
practices and by the information behaviours that are part of them.
Originality/value –The paper addsa new perspective to the understanding of place and space in the study of
information behaviour.
Keywords Leisure pursuits, Hobbies, Information behaviour, Place, Social practice, Space, The social
construction of meaning, Context
Paper type Conceptual paper
Introduction
Physical space is often seen as the context for information behaviour. A simple example
would be the way that sheer distance could act as a limit on information seeking. However, the
nature of context is itself much contested in our field (Courtright, 2007;Agarwal, 2018).
Context is indeed often seen as the setting, environment or background to the subject of
interest, the information behaviour. It is then treated as an objectively describable set of
conditions that shape behaviour. It is easy to see how space could be treated in those terms,
when it is so often defined in terms of precisely measurable distances and coordinates. Yet, at
other times context is seen as defined in relation to a specific information actor, as person-in-
context (Courtright, 2007). Here what is salient about a specific place would be defined by the
actor and their information need. A further conceptualisation recognises that the person is
embedded in the context (Courtright, 2007). Since individuals are influenced and can influence
their context, the two must be seen as interwoven. Here “context is not something that
describes a setting; it’s something that people do.”(Dourish, 2004). Applied to place it would
imply that it both shapes social action and is shaped by it.
Geography is veryoften conceptualised merely in thefirst sense of context as a setting for
the real activities of interest. But we suggest that this needs to be reconsidered. Indeed, as
Gibson and Kaplan(2017) observe, library and information science (LIS)has “not d eveloped a
Geographies of
information
behaviour
745
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
https://www.emerald.com/insight/0022-0418.htm
Received 23 May 2021
Revised 6 August 2021
Accepted 10 August 2021
Journal of Documentation
Vol. 78 No. 4, 2022
pp. 745-760
© Emerald Publishing Limited
0022-0418
DOI 10.1108/JD-05-2021-0105
coherent, complex body of theory related to place, space and information behavior”(p. 131).
This paper seeksto enrich this theorisation. Wetake as our starting point Savolainen’s (2006)
summary of how space has been treated in information seeking. This reflects the way that
space is typically seen as context for information behaviour: an outside container often
constraininginformation seeking.It has also featured recurrentlyin metaphorsfor information
behaviours, like information seeking.
We suggest that an alternative perspective would be to recognise the ways in which the
meanings attached to particular spaces, when they are experienced as places, are actively
constructed within social practices including the information behaviours that are woven
through those practices (Harrison and Dourish, 1996). In simple terms it would be useful to
differentiate “objectively”measured space and meaningful place. To illustrate the value of
this approach, we examine three pastimes: running, urban exploration and genealogy,
drawing on our own published research on these topics (cited below) and the wider literature.
While there are no details in our presentation of these pastimes that have not been reported in
previous empirical work, by ourselves or others, we draw out new theoretical significance
from these characterisations through this space versus place distinction.
The analysis reveals the very different spaces used and how they are used differently.
Indeed, the meaning of place is defined differently within each social practice. We argue that
rather than seeing spaces as bounding limits on information behaviours, how places are used,
felt and understood are shaped by the wider social practices within which information
behaviour is framed.
Space in the study of information behaviour
Savolainen (2006) has established the importance of space, including metaphors of space, in
information seeking. He identifies three broad approaches to its treatment, reflecting different
metatheoretical assumptions about human agency:
(1) The objectifying approach, based on a positivist set of assumptions that sees space as
having objective characteristics beyond human control and tending to act as a
constraining structure on information seeking behaviour, for example, distance,
security or obstruction, reducing access to information. Savolainen (2006) interpreted
information foraging as potentially an example of this approach.
(2) The realistic-pragmatic approach which recognises more human agency in choosing
how to navigate through spatial aspects of information or take control over it to make
information activities easier. Information grounds and information pathways are
examples of this viewpoint.
(3) The perspectivist approach uses space as a metaphor for how information resources
relate to the individual, as in the notion of information horizons or landscapes (Lloyd,
2006;Savolainen, 2020).
This analysis suggests that in various ways the characteristics of a space are likely to shape
how information is sought (and by extension used and created). A simple example is sheer
distance. Thus, Gibson and Kaplan (2017) identify typical zones of information seeking in
terms of distance, such as home, local, regional and long distance, as distinct from a base,
within which different social groups seek for different types of information. Their findings
reveal the wider geographical range of information activities of richer people. Clearly, then,
factors such as proximity have some impact on ease of access to information. We need to
know more about how the physical properties of spaces constrain or indeed facilitate
information access. But it also seems to be important to consider how these attributes of space
are thought about by information users themselves. We know that what feels close may be
different from what is close in terms of objective distance.
JD
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746
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