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Information retrieval systems as intermediaries

Wednesday, 16 November 2016

Assigned reading

Today we will be joined by Anita Crescenzi, who will talk to us about Interactive Information Retrieval (IIR) systems as intermediaries between people and information.

Information systems provide a direct interface between people and information. This is sometimes referred to as disintermediation, which can be understood as removing a human intermediary and placing information directly into the hands of a person seeking it. This conceptualization is perhaps too simple, given the complexity of IIR systems and what underlies them.

These systems embed the worldview of the people who design, create, and maintain them as well as the people who create the information itself. The worldview of a user may be matched or mismatched from this embedded worldview, but there is not usually an affordance that allows the system to be aware of this.

It is important to interrogate how systems work, in terms of inputs and outputs, to consider how effective they are as intermediaries and what they enable or block users from doing. We can think of this in terms of features and affordances as expressions of the underlying systematic structure.

The following question, in various forms, can help us to this: How (and how well) does the system support

  1. recognizing a need for,
  2. accepting the challenge of finding,
  3. formulating strategies for finding and identifying relevant forms of,
  4. expressing need for,
  5. examining resulting,
  6. reformulating queries for, and
  7. using resulting

information (missing reference).

To consider these questions create a matrix with the activities listed above in bold at the top and a list of search engines, databases, and other platforms (Google, PubMed, LISS, Pinterest, etc.) on the left.

Slides from today's class will be made available here.


Information retrieval systems as intermediaries - November 16, 2016 -