Pergamon h~fi~rmation Processing & Management, Vol. 33, No. 1, pp. 55-67. 1997

Copyright © 1997 Elsevier Science Lid Printed in Great Britain. All rights reserved

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INFORMATION AS PROCESS: THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CORROBORATING EVIDENCE AND "INFORMATION" IN

HUMANISTIC RESEARCH DOMAINS

CHARLES COLE Graduate School of Library and Information Science, Elborn College, The University of Western

Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada N6G 1H I

(Received 24 January 1996; accepted 6 June 19661

Abstract--The article reports the results of a non-randomized study of 45 history Ph.D. students, and discusses the results in terms of the theory of knowledge structure and the modification of knowledge structure due to "information" discussed in Cole (Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 45, 465-476, 1994). In the study, the Ph.D. students answered questions about the circumstances surrounding recent information events---events which resulted in the Ph.D. students becoming informed while reading for their thesis. Using the grounded theory methodology of Glaser and Strauss (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1967), patterns of cognitive activity during an information process were observed, and a model of what an information process may be like for the history Ph.D. students interviewed is proposed based on an analysis of these similarities. The model of the information process is made up of five stages, which happen one after the other, but which may be separated by long periods of time. Associated with these stages are two different types of information seeking behaviour: unconscious-unfocused and conscious-focused. Copyright © 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd

INTRODUCTION

The notion that information is "subjectively constructed" by the person seeking the information is at the heart of the new paradigm or cognitive approach in information needs and uses research (Dervin and Nilan, 1986). A corollary of this notion is that information is constructed piece by piece, that it is not a "thing" but a process--a process with a beginning and end. An equation that describes information-as-process and information as a subjective construct is Brookes" "fundamental equation":

[A/] + [ K ] ~ [ K + AK] (Brookes, 1977. p. 56)

This "equation" is made up of the information user's state of knowledge about a particular topic. which Brookes calls a "knowledge structure" (K). As a result of "information" (A/), the original knowledge structure is modified in a process (as indicated in the "equation" by the arrow). Information, therefore, may be defined as "that which modifies knowledge structure" (Brookes, 1977, p. 57; Brookes, 1980, p. 131; cf. also Ingwersen, 19921. Here, Brookes simply put what other writers on information had been saying previously (e.g. MacKay, 1969, p. 42; Pratt, 1977. p. 215), thus clarifying certain assumptions about information that were theretofore ambigu-

ously stated. The purpose of Cole (1994b) was to operationalize the notion of information as a subjective

construct, based on the definition of information given in Brookes' "fundamental equation". To this end, Brookes' definition of information was put into the form of a criterion of information:

Criterion I: Information "must" modify knowledge structure.

However, what kind of modification of knowledge structure constitutes "information?" Minsky's (1975) frame theory posits a perceptual system that allows for minor modifications of

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56 Charles Cole

knowledge structure via default mechanisms at the lower level of the knowledge structure. In Cole (1994b), it was assumed that these modifications do not qualify as information as it is defined in Brookes' "fundamental equation." This assumption too was put into the form of a criterion:

Criterion 2: Information must modify knowledge structure at the highest fundamental level of it, not the lower level of it.

It was further assumed in Cole (1994b) that the type of information being defined by Brookes' "fundamental equation" is relatively rare because there is a strong tendency for the individual's perceptual processing system to keep out nonconforming sense data that will start off such a fundamental modification of knowledge structure. Common "information" is what people normally think of as "information": Your train leaves at 6 o'clock. This is information-as-thing (Buckland, 199l)•

The rare type of "information" being talked about here is not object-like, "brick-like" [Dervin and Nilan's (1986) term] or think-like; it is about something "new," something a person does not know but comes to know. If a person does not know the time the train leaves, an average person already knows a great deal of the "information" she is looking for because she has a knowledge structure for "train stations"; the exact time the train departs can be taken care of by default slots at the lower level of this knowledge structure (see Criterion 2 above).

But for someone who knows nothing about what she is looking for, who doesn't know what she is looking for, how does she "start" knowing? In such a situation, everything out there is "potential information," but it is really just "data" (Ingwersen, 1995, p. 139).

This is the "conundrum" at the centre of cognitive science, which cognitive science traces back to Plato and the Meno paradoxes (Newell and Simon, 1990, p. 126; Luger et al., 1994, p. 18). [For a discussion of the "conundrum" in information science, see de Mey, who uses the term "cognitive paradox" (de Mey, 1982, pp. 18, 201); cf. also Cole (1994b).] In cognitive psychology, Ulrich Neisser used the "conundrum" as a tool of analysis, putting it into the form of a "dialectical contradiction":

we cannot perceive unless we anticipate, bat we must not see only what we anticipate •. . (Neisser, 1976, p. 43).

Neisser concluded that perception does "involve the pickup of real information" - - "real information" in the sense that it is "information" that is not controlled by the person's anticipations or expectations of what she is looking for (Neisser, 1976, p. 43).

However, the issue of the "initiating conditions" of the "pickup" continues to be the subject of debate in cognitive science. There are those (like Gibson, 1979) who contend that perception is "typically" unmediated, which means there is a "direct pickup" of information, and there are those (like Fodor and Pylyshyn, 1990), who hold the so-called "Establishment" view that perception is "indirect" because it is "typically" inferentially mediated--although even "inferences need premises," Fodor and Pylyshyn state (1990, p. 295). Attributing the differences between Gibson and the "Establishment" as semantics, Fodor and Pylyshyn conclude that the distinction between direct versus indirect pick up is "coextensive with the distinction between 'sensory' properties and the rest" (Fodor and Pylyshyn, 1990, p. 295). There is a "sensory register" where all sensory information is briefly maintained after it is transduced (Forgus and Melamed, 1976, p. 10). It is possibly here in this registry that "data" or "potential information" enters the perceptual system and is either turned into "sense data" or is not (for the distinction between "data"---or "potential information"--and "sense data" cf. Ingwersen, 1995, p. 163).

Following Fodor (1983), in Cole (1994b) a way around the "conundrum" was suggested, where nonconforming sense data that have the potential to "initiate" the modification of knowledge structure in a fundamental way find their way into the person's perceptual system in a two stage process, beginning with a "sensory registry." In the case of information coming from a textual source, the first stage of this process consists of a "word registry." That is, everything an individual reads from a textual source enters the perceptual system, but most of it remains at the level of the unconscious, stored in this word registry, unless a second stage occurs. According to van Dijk and Kintsch, who base their theory to a certain extent on Fodor's theory of modularity, " . . . only a small subset of what is taken in [during the unconscious perceptual

Information as process 57

processing] is selected for further processing and ever becomes a conscious precept" (van Dijk and Kintsch, 1983, p. 34).

In Cole (1994b), this unconscious-conscious, two phase aspect of "information" was also put into the form of a criterion of information:

Criterion 3: In order for information to be unexpected and expected, old and new at the same time, information must enter the perceptual system in at least a two-stage process.

There may be other types of information that have different characteristics than the type of information described by the above criteria. Buckland (1991 ), for example, does not rule out the possibility that information is also a "thing", and that information-as-thing and information-as- process may in fact exist in the same information theory. One could argue, for example, that the "initiating condition" of information-as-process is in fact information-as-thing. But it is probably better to think of the initiating condition of information-as-process as "sense data," and not as information-as-thing.

SIMILAR APPROACHES IN INFORMATION SCIENCE

The approach to information taken in the present study is cognitive and assumes that information is a process made up of stages that over time, and using a mixture of qualitative and quantitative methodologies, can be delineated and operationally defined. Belkin, Kuhlthau and Dervin (Belkin, 1980, 1990; Belkin et al., 1982; Belkin and Vickery, 1985; Kuhlthau, 1989, 1991, 1993; Kuhlthau et aL, 1990; Dervin, 1992; Dervin and Dewdney, 1986; Dervin and Nilan, 1986; Dervin et al., 1982) discuss information from perspectives that can be extended to include these concerns, and the three theories have been looked at recently as a single unit by Morris (1994) and Westbrook (1993) [Morris includes Taylor (1968) in her discussion, and Westbrook also includes Ellis (1993)].

The closest of the three to describing an information-as-process model of information is Kuhlthau, although the specific theory she has developed is a model of an information search process (ISP). In an extension of Kuhlthau's ISP model (to bring it into conformity with the concept of information-as-process), the person who seeks information becomes "informed" in a series of stages:

(i) First, an outside message with the requisite proportion of "uniqueness" (1993, p. 30) causes in the person (ii) cognitive uncertainty ("a lack of understanding, a gap") (1993, p. 111), which causes (iii) affective uncertainty (doubt) (1993, p. 111), which initiates (iv) "information seeking," (v) When the task of the information seeker has become "internalized" (Kuhlthau's "focus" (1993, p. 72), the need for meaning and meaning construction begins, the raw materials of which are all subsequent information that is found. (vi) Meaning construction ends when the need for meaning is satisfied. As a corollary, the information need is also satisfied.

In an extension of Belkin's theory of ASK (to bring it into conformity with the concept of information-as-process), a person seeking information becomes "informed" in a series of stages:

(i) First, the person is confronted with a problematic situation, but only one aspect of the situation, the (ii) problematic aspect (1980, p. 136), which is the (iii) recognition ("awareness") of an insufficiency, gap or anomaly (abnormal breakdown) in one's own knowledge (Belkin and Vickery, 1985, p. 15)--this is associated with feelings of uncertainty. (iv) The gap or anomaly can be analyzed by an outside observer (via an analysis of the strength of concept associations); the analysis will enable the intermediary (librarian or IR

58 Charles Cole

software) to help the patron resolve the gap by suggesting appropriate information (Belkin et aL, 1982). (v) The gap is "resolved" with the suggested information.

In an extension of Dervin's sense making theory (to bring it into conformity with the concept of information-as-process), a person seeking information becomes "informed" in a series of stages:

(i) First, the person is confronted by a SITUATION, but what is important is a specific aspect of the "situation" only, namely the individual's perspective on the situation (Dervin and Dewdney, 1986, p. 507), or: (ii) the GAP-situation, which may be defined as "an occurrence that raises questions" (Dervin and Dewdney, 1986, p. 507). When this happens, (iii) the sense or meaning in the situation runs out or breaks down (Dervin and Nilan, 1986, p. 21). (iv) The individual then attempts to reconstruct meaning or sense by defining the gap then bridging the gap (Dervin, 1992). (v) The individual defines the gap and bridges the gap by seeking out "instructions from the environment" (Dervin et al., 1982, p. 429). (iv) This results in the construction of new sense or meaning so that the individual can "move forward" again.

In the three theories just described, the starting off point of information-as-process is the "problem situation" (Belkin), "situation-gap" (Dervin), or the situation-determinative assign- ments Kuhlthau hands to the subjects in her study (Kuhlthau, 1993, p. 72). In the three theories, the "situation" leads to a cognitive "gap." In all three theories, an importance is accorded to the individual becoming "aware" of the "gap" in order for active information seeking to occur.

However, gaps must be present in all our knowledge structures about everything all the t ime--what Dervin calls the "assumption of discontinuity" (Dervin, 1992, p. 62)--and yet we are not consciously seeking out information about something all the time. At an unconscious level, however, it is very possible we are seeking out information about something all the time. Especially in the humanities and social sciences, this phase of information-as-process must be of grave importance (cf. Stone, 1982; Bakewell et al., 1988; Case, 1991; and Siegfried et al.,

1993). The difference between a gap that leads to active, conscious information seeking and one that

does not must be either quantitative or qualitative in nature, or both. (It is most likely both. Ingwersen, for example, states that it is the "task/interest" which initiates the desire for information, without which no information seeking behaviour will begin (lngwersen, 1996, p. 15).) In the case of Belkin, with the importance he accords "awareness" of the gap, and Kuhlthau, with her concern for the ratio between uniqueness and redundancy in an incoming message, there is the implication that the size of the gap may be important, i.e. that there is a quantitative difference between a gap that leads to conscious information seeking behaviour and one that does not.

Therefore, two general statements about the initiating stage of the information (search) process, derived from these three theories are:

That one of the initiating elements of an information (search) process where active, conscious information seeking occurs may have something to do with the recognition or awareness by the individual of a gap in his or her knowledge structure, which (b) may be dependent on a certain threshold being reached in the size of this gap (a gap large enough to trip the individual into awareness of the gap).

THE STUDY

In the study (Cole, 1994a), a convenience sample of 45 history studients doing their Ph.D. at the English universities of Sheffield, York, Manchester, Leicester, Leeds and Nottingham were

Information as process 59

interviewed about their research and the role of "information" in their research. The students were interviewed only once, the interviews lasting from 45 to 75 minutes. The questions in the interviews focused on what the Ph.D. history students were reading during information situations that were either very recent and/or important enough for them to remember. Examples of information situations were (i) turning points in the Ph.D. student's research which the Ph.D. student could trace to specific documents, and (ii) insights that occurred which the Ph.D. student could trace to a specific document. The students were able to remember such situations, usually more than one, and in great detail (the layout of the page, where the item that sparked the turning point or insight was found, etc,).

The intention of the study was to explore the notion that information is constructed by the individual, and that this is a process with a beginning and an end. The intention was not to achieve results that could be generalized to a larger population. Therefore, the representativeness of the interview subjects with regard to pre-selected characteristics or variables was not an important factor in deciding who was to be interviewed, although these characteristics were considered. Generally speaking, the group of Ph.D. history students interviewed for the study appears to differ from what one would expect the population of history Ph.D. students in general to be, and in several important respects: (i) the high number of Ph.D. students in the study who were over 50 years of age (16 of the 45 students); (ii) the large percentage of part-time Ph.D. students in the study (23 of the 45 students); and (iii) the preponderance of men over women in the study (a ratio of two to one).

METHODOLOGY

The purpose of the present study is to set the ground work for a series of studies whose ultimate goal is to say generalizable things about what the information process is for historians and other researchers in the humanities and social sciences. The specific goal of the present study was to discover variables that can be tested at a later time under controlled conditions, and to put these variables together into a model or theory of information-as-process. A methodology that is designed for exploring a subject area and "theory building" in that subject area is the grounded theory approach developed by sociologists Glaser and Strauss (1967) (cf. also, Strauss, 1987; Strauss and Corbin, 1990). This particular methodology has been used by researchers in many disciplines, as well as in information science (e.g. Ellis, 1993: Spink, ! 993).

There are several principles upon which grounded theory is based that weaken the internal validity of the exercise at hand from a statistical point of view. When enough cases /as determined by the researcher) of the characteristic of the activity being studied are found, the methodology gives permission to the researcher to stop examining that characteristic in all subsequent cases, as the category or characteristic is deemed "saturated". As a result, the final theory brings certain characteristics or categories from one group of cases together with other characteristics or categories from other groups of cases. This means that no one case necessarily exhibits all the characteristics of the behaviour as stated in the final theory, either ( 1 ) because the evidence was not found in that particular case, or (2) because the evidence was not looked for in that particular case. It is assumed (1) that the evidence could have been found if it had been looked for, and (2) that the researcher could go back to the cases done before the characteristic was noticed and find the characteristic in these cases as well. Unlike the analytic induction method, which is similar to grounded theory in some ways, the "negative case" (which may disprove the theory) is not actively sought out in grounded theory (Taylor and Bogdan, 1984, p. 125).

RESULTS

The presentation of the results is divided into five parts, each of which corresponds to a stage in the simplified model of the information process shown in Table 1. For each stage of the model

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Stage 1. Stage 2. Stage 3. Stage 4. Stage 5.

Charles Cole

Table 1

Stages of the information process

Opening of the information process Representational (cognitive) activity Corroborating evidence looked for and found Closing of the information process Effect of information process

of the information process, an excerpt from an interview with one of the Ph.D. history students is given to illustrate the characteristics of that stage. The excepts, alone and together, are for illustrative purposes only, and cannot be generalized to Ph.D. history students in general or to any other group of information users.

Stage 1. Opening of the information process

In Stage 1 of the model, the information process "opens" or begins. The illustrative example of such an opening that follows is from a Ph.D. history student whose thesis was about Anglo- French peace negotiations during the French Revolutionary Wars. The orthodox view of these wars was that England was the overwhelmingly weaker of the two countries. However, as a result of reading a French government decree, the Ph.D. history student concluded otherwise.

The Ph.D. student begins the quote by expressing his "disbelief" at what the document seemed to be saying:

Because I first read it, and then it struck me because it was an important measure which I had never heard--I've never read about in the secondary literature before--so I read it first of all rather disbelievingly, thinking perhaps that I hadn't understood it properly; it was written in French of course so I distrusted my translation, so I remember puzzling over for some time before I realized that it was really. . ." (Interview 24, Disk 3, page 60, line 1).

In the above quote, the student said that upon reading the piece of text that opened the information process his first reaction was one of disbelief: " . . . so I read it first of all rather disbelievingly". One can attach two possible meanings to the word "disbelievingly." The first possible meaning is that the Ph.D. history student was "astonished" by what he saw, or he "couldn't" believe what he was seeing, as in "I can't believe my eyes." The second possible meaning of the word "disbelievingly" is that the Ph.D. history student knew what he was reading and did not believe the veracity of what was said in the document. A few lines later, however, the Ph.D. history student said: "so I remember puzzling over for some time before I realized that it was r e a l l y . . . "

These last words suggest a third possible meaning, that the Ph.D. student did not know what he was seeing in the document in the sense of "recognizing" it. It was too "new," and in order to process it he had to "puzzle" over it for some time.

I will make the assumption that the "opening" of the information process of this student, and the "puzzling over," are two different stages of the process. The "puzzling over" may be more generally labelled as "representational activity."

Stage 2. Representational activity

Intuitively, we know when we read something new or unexpected there is some sort of cognitive reaction. A general description of such a reaction was described by one history student as "I sift them around and relate them to other things" (Interview 11, Disk 1, page 100, line 5).

The following example illustrates in more specific detail the form this representational activity may take in an information process. The working title of the Ph.D. student's thesis was "A Survey of Religious Guilds in the Later Middle Ages in the Historic County of Yorkshire, Up to and including Dissolution." The Ph.D. student's primary source material was "several

Information as process 61

thousand wills" written in Latin. Most of these were routine. However, in one will a deceased guild member left the guild two sheep that could not be sold:

"Answer: Because it's not just collecting, which is what, it's a bit more than just collecting. I think if you start seeing these folks as people it makes you think it, makes you wonder, it makes you think to yourself, two sheep! I mean, this isn't an irrelevancy, but the thought is perhaps almost an irrelevancy, but it's not, because you think "two sheep?"--now what does this tell us about this guild that he thought they wanted two sheep? Two sheep indeed that they're not allowed to sell--this was a will I got last week. No, they have to be used for the purposes of the guild and no one's allowed to sell them.

Question: What was going through your mind?

Answer: Yes, I thought, Is this the wool they have to use?

Question: Is this the what?

Answer: The wool they have to use or are they supposed to slaughter them for their own needs, I don't know, because of course guilds were, the annual party was quite an important part of." (Interview 20, Disk 2, page 103, line 8).

In the above portion of the interview, the Ph.D. student attempted to find possible explanations for an unexpected data element in a will by relating it to the practices of the guild of which the Ph.D. student was already familiar. The Ph.D. student came up with two possible explanations, which could be termed the "information set":

(1) "is this the wool they have to use?" (Interview 20, Disk 2, page 103, line 24). (2) "'or are they supposed to slaughter them [the sheep] for their own needs . . . [for] the annual pa r ty . . . " (Interview 20, Disk 2, page 103, line 29).

"The sheep that cannot be sold" data element that opened the information process resonates in the student's mind, but resonates without any answer. However, the two alternatives suggested by the student may motivate the student to seek out corroborating evidence in support of one or

the other.

Stage 3. Corroborating evidence searched for

The information process that will be described to illustrate the search for corroborating evidence phase of the information process centres on the concept of "godparenthood" in Yorkshire in the two hundred years from 1500 to 1700, The information process resulted in what the interviewee called a "crucial point" in his research, that affected " . . . a third of my thesis if you like, at the highest possible conceptual l e v e l . . . " (Interview 34, Disk 3, page 41, line 37).

The Ph.D. history student presented the information "problem" that opened the process in the

following way:

"In early modem society, 1670s England, everyone goes around saying: if children are orphaned their godparents really should adopt them, and you get this time and time again in liturgy and various comments of people, from theologians down to letters. The problem is in no case I've ever found of people actually doing this, so I thought well this is difficult to understand" (Interview 34, Disk 3, page 39, line 46).

This statement of the "problem" is not the same thing as what "opened" the information process. The "opening" of the process is unknown. Because this Ph.D. history student did not comment on what happened after the process "opened," Stage 2 is also unknown. It is assumed here that the "opening" of the information process provoked some sort of "representational activity:" then an "information set" was consciously or unconsciously created, setting out paths or lines of

enquiry for the student to follow. One of these paths or lines of enquiry led the Ph.D. history student to widen his reading to

the 20th century, to cross over from history into anthropology, another discipline, and to expand his search beyond England to Latin America. Here, he found corroborating evidence for a "gap," or a lack of understanding he had had about the practices of godparenthood in 17th century

Yorkshire:

'°. . . then I was reading an anthropological argument by Goodman in which he said, when he

62 Charles Cole

was interviewing, somewhere in Central America, I think it's Panama: everybody said that godparents really ought to adopt but nobody ever did" (interview 34, Disk 3, page 39, line 56).

The corroborating evidence the student found was that the situation in present day Panama could be applied to 17th century Yorkshire; it allowed him to state that the difference between the belief by present day experts (anthropologists and historians) that godparenthood was important in 20th century Latin America and unimportant in 16th and 17th century Yorkshire may have been solely one of evidence, not fact:

" . . . and this affects the whole broad picture that traditionally people have said: in Latin America and Southern Europe godparenthood is very important, in Northern Europe and Northern America it's not very important, but I think this will introduce the idea to me that the difference is one of evidence, that people bothered to go and ask people in Papua New Guinea, and didn't bother to go and ask anybody in Northern Europe, and you certainly can't in the 16th century, the quality of evidence is very similar within the sort of limits of people being dead of course, that kind of changed" (Interview 34, Disk 3, page 40, line 10).

In the above quote, the Ph.D. student appears to have switched countries, from Panama (in the previous quotation) to Papua New Guinea. As well, the wording, especially at the end of the portion of the interview just quoted, indicates irresolution and the need for further information seeking to confirm, elaborate or "contextualize" the information process.

Stage 4. Information process "closes"

In the example chosen to illustrate the closing stage of an information process, the information process appears to have "opened" when the Ph.D. student, who was researching Pietism in 18th century Yorkshire, looked at a document and saw the juxtaposition of the names of local religious figures and the names of international religious figures in a single line of text. The second and third stages of this information process are unknown.

As a result of the juxtaposit ion of the proper names, the student said he was able to "set" what he already knew about the particular religious sect he was studying (the Moravians), into a European-wide movement of "Pietism," which he had known about before the information process occurred:

"Pietism was there but it was in the background; I was thinking of the institutions, structures, what in fact occurred, so although Pietism was there it was as you might say in the background of my mind. Now I'm reading widely about Pietism, which perhaps I ought to have done earlier, I now see the context . . ." (Interview 29, Disk 3, page 63, line 41).

The information process allowed him to set the Moravians in a wider context of religious persecution in Europe after the Reformation:

" . . . because Formack was reflecting a very wide deep rooted European movement which formulated itself in the 17th century, reached a high point in the 18th, and of which the Moravian Church was a particular example of a very zealous movement within that movement, and that in Formack therefore you had something quite foreign to Yorkshire.. ." (Interview 29, Disk 3, page 65, line 8).

In the above quote, the Ph.D. student gives some indication of a barrier to this information process: he had been overly concerned with the particular conditions in Yorkshire.

Stage 5. Effect of information process: KS is modified

After an information process has closed, 11 of the 45 Ph.D. history students commented on the effect of the process: the ability to perceive newness in material that had been read before the information process.

In the example chosen to illustrate this "effect," the student's thesis topic was "The War at Sea: 1688 to 1714," but the student's specific interest was English privateering or the commerce raiding of French ships during the wars against Louis XIV. The information process itself will

Information as process 63

not be given here. As a result of the information process, the history student developed a "concept of the merchants," a concept which expanded the size of the section he was going to devote to the subject from 6000 to 20,000 words of his total thesis.

The Ph.D. student then looked for corroborating evidence for the concept, in his supervisor's book, which he had read before the information process in question had taken place. In the following quote the student described the pre-information process and post-information process readings of the supervisor's book (the supervisor's name has been deleted):

~'Ya, and it didn't fit, but suddenly when I got this whole concept of the merchants, ah well whose book should I look at, ah [the student's supervisor's book]. And as soon as I started to read it again I was more interested because I was searching for something and picking new things out, and suddenly it was useful and not just background reading and that's when l read best" (Interview 22, Disk 3, page 21, line 7).

DISCUSSION

The basic assumptions of the present study are that information is subjectively constructed piece by piece by the individual, so that information itself is not a thing but a process with a beginning and an end. Therefore, the pieces of which the process is composed should not also be described as information, but as something else. Here, I have used other terms, each associated with a different stage of the information process:

(a) Stage 1: "opening" or "initiating" data element (b) Stage 3: "corroborating" data element or evidence (c) Stage 4: "confirming" evidence

There is a progression in the terminology used, which indicates a firming-up or an increase in focus of the information process from beginning to end. This increase must also have something to do with the person becoming more aware or conscious of the ~'information" contained within the process as the process moves on towards closure.

There must also be a gradualness in the process by which the person becomes aware of a gap in understanding. In the model of the information process described here, this assumption is purposefully built into the model, although the evidence for it is slight. In the Results section, an example is given of the "opening" of the information process, which occurs when the Ph.D. student reads a French decree ordering the expulsion of all foreigners. The data element which opened the process causes the student to "puzzl[e] over for some time." This is taken to mean that the student didn't know what it was he had just read (in the French government decree).

I have purposefully emphasized the unconscious or semi-conscious aspect of this "opening" stage because there is such a clear indication in this example that there was a time-lag between when the student first read the decree and when he recognized what it was he had actually read. There is such a strong aspect of formation, actualization, of something coming into consciousness, that it is difficult to conceive of the very beginning of the process as not being unconscious.

This observation, however, extends beyond the explicit focus of the information theories of Belkin, Dervin and Kuhlthau. As described earlier in this article, one of the two general conclusions that can be drawn from an analysis of their theories is that their theories "formally'" begin with the person becoming aware of a gap in understanding, or a gap in meaning or sense. When the person becomes aware of the gap, the person engages in information seeking behaviour, which is the primary focus of these theories. However, all these theories (especially Dervin's and Kuhlthau's) implicitly acknowledge the existence of information seeking behaviour that is "pre-awarenesss" and thus out of their theories' terms of reference. By extending the parameters of the discussion about what "information" is to include what is pre- awareness or unconscious, the present study provides some evidence for stage "zero"-- the initiating conditions" where the information process actually "opens."

64 Charles Cole

The theoretical support for the existence of the "unconscious .... opening" of an information process is the research into word identification done by Swinney (1979), the theory of modularity of Fodor (1983), as well as the theory of discourse comprehension of van Dijk and Kintsch (1983) that developed from Swinney and Fodor (cf. also, Kintsch and Mross, 1985; Kintsch, 1988, 1993). According to Fodor (1983), word identification in reading is "mandatory," "unconscious" and "stupid" (i.e. the context in which the word is found in the text and the pre- existing knowledge of the reader does not affect the word intake). However, van Dijk and Kintsch (1983) state that "a lot of evidence exists today that this unconscious perceptual processing extends to the level of meaningfulness" (van Dijk and Kintsch, 1983, p. 34).

In the French government decree example, it is feasible that when the Ph.D. student first read the French government decree, the data element which opened the information process slipped unnoticed into a registry (Stage 1). Almost immediately, however, the student became aware of a "gap" in his understanding. He "puzzled over" it (Stage 2), and sought out and found external data elements or corroborating evidence (Stage 3) in order to understand what it was he had just read in the decree.

To understand the component parts of the information process being described, it is necessary to distinguish between (1) the "information" that resulted from the entire process, and (2) the individual parts of the process: (2a) the opening data element (Stage 1), and (2b) the external corroborating data element (Stage 3). (1) In the French decree example, the overall information that resulted from the entire information process was that the English were not as weak vis-a-vis the French as is commonly assumed by present day historians. The student comments on this were:

"In the end it seems to me from the evidence that I've examined, that the opposite is true, that England was in a much stronger strategic position than France, that it was England who made all the running during the negotiations, and furthermore that politicians at the time knew it, and it's an historical fallacy, it's a red herring, that started practically at the time, to say the opposite." (Interview 24, Disk 3, page 59, line 10).

(2a) The opening data element, which is Stage 1 of this information process, was the French government decree ordering the expulsion of all foreigners (already given in the Results section). (2b) The corroborating data element, which is Stage 3 of the information process, is contained in the following quote. The student said:

"It [the decree] was never properly carried out. I don't think on reflection they even intended it to be, because the French didn't have an adequate police force for that sort of thing at the time" (Interview 24, Disk 3, page 60, line 12).

Because it is probable that such a decree would not in itself contain whether or not the instructions issued therein were ever carried out, we can assume that this piece of corroborating evidence was external to the document and was found after reading the decree.

When the external data element was found, it caused the initiating data element of the process, which was in the decree itself, to fully come forth into the conscious part of the Ph.D. student's working memory. The initiating data element of the information process, and the external corroborating evidence then joined together, allowing the student to identify or label "what" it was he had read in the decree. It also began the next phase of the information process, the contextualizing phase (the "why"), which I have labelled as Stage 4.

In Stage 4 of the model of the information process being proposed here, the Ph.D. student contextualizes the initiating data element and the external corroborating data element(s) by "setting," "widening" or "crystallizing" these data elements into the student's own pre-existing background knowledge of the subject of the thesis and how the world functions in general (including human nature).

In the present example of the Ph.D. student whose information process began when he read a French government decree, the initial data element which opened the process (contained within the decree), and the corroborating data element which he found outside the document (that the French never carded out the order expulsing all foreigners), set or widened into what he previously knew about the world in general and how and why people behave in that world. He said:

Information as process 65

"1 suddenly realized that the French government was terrified of the British, was terrified of the British militarily and terrified of the British influence on French politics, and terrified of the British in terms of spies and guerilla warfare in the south of France and in Normandy, that started me thinking that the French were so scared of Britain, the normal interpretaton of France having won the war strategically, that is having defeated Austria, Prussia and Holland, doesn' t mean too much for Anglo-French relations themselves." (Interview 24, Disk 3, page 59, line 29).

In Stage 5 of the in fo rma t ion process the knowledge s t ructure of the Ph,D. s tudent is

f u n d a m e n t a l l y modif ied , w h i c h is the def ini t ion of " i n f o r m a t i o n " set out by Brookes in his

" f u n d a m e n t a l equa t ion . " P roo f of this modi f ica t ion is that af ter the in format ion process the

s tudent is able to re read old mater ia l and see new th ings in it.

For the Ph.D. s tuden t w h o s e in fo rmat ion process began when he read a French g o v e r n m e n t

decree, there is e v i d e n c e for the f undam en t a l modi f ica t ion o f his thesis knowledge s t ructure in

the fo l l owing quote. By " d o c u m e n t " he means the decree itself:

"'Answer: . . . after that, after reading that document, 1 went through a room full of other things, memoirs and things like that, and the impression you get is really that the [French] government was very, very scared."

Question: Can you think of an example of a confirmation of your impression you got from this thing?

Answer: Yes another French government order to close the ports between, to close the ports between, close the ports of Dieppe and Calais, so that there could be no contact between England and France during the three week period which was the period that the French elections were taking place, which was not normal, it was unprecedented during an election time.

Question: So the magnitude was there, now was also the panic there'?

Answer: No, and it wasn't really a very massive measure-- the connection's pretty small and it was quite an easy measure to carry out, but everthing confirms itself after that, if you want to look at in in that way.

Question: Look at what?

Answer: If you, well if you have an initial hypothesis that the government was scared, it's quite easy to see that an awful lot of their actions were formed in this spirit, in this psychological." (Interview 24, Disk 3, page 60, line 46).

This is the type o f ev idence wh ich suppor ts the theoret ical not ion that for the type of person in

Table 2

A five stage model of the information process for the 45 Ph.D. history students interviewed for the study

Stage I.

Stage 2.

Stage 3.

Stage 4.

Stage 5.

Opening of information process - - conscious - - unconscious

Representational (cognitive) activity - - set of alternative possibilities

- - c o n s c i o u s

- - unconscious Corroborating evidence sought and found (the "what'. ).̀ )

- - conscious - - focused information seeking behaviour

- - unconscious - - unfocused information seeking behaviour

Closing of process (the "why?") - - contextualization of the opening and

corroborating data elements - - internally located - - externally located

- - focused information seeking behaviour Effect of process: Knowledge Structure is modilied

- - the ability to "see" newness in triaterial read before - - focused information seeking to confirm "information"

66 Charles Cole

the study, that as a result of an information process the student's thesis knowledge structure is modified in a fundamental way.

CONCLUSION

A preliminary model of the information process for the 45 Ph.D. history students in the study, which encompasses both the cognitive activity involved and the information seeking behaviour resulting from this activity, is shown in Table 2 below.

One would expect certain information processes, if not most, to lead one into another as the student progresses in his or her thesis research. In addition, there are no doubt other elements that should be included in the crucial Stage 4 contextualization phase of the information process, some of which have to do with corroborating or confirming data elements or corroborating evidence that are externally not internally located. What is essential to the overall model of the information process for the group of Ph.D. history students studied here is that at least some of the information seeking these students do is driven by unconscious or semi-unconscious motivations that stem from information processes that are only in their opening stages (Stages 1-3), where they are trying to establish the "what" of the information process--what is it they have just read.

The second of two general conclusions that was drawn from the analysis of the theories of Kuhlthau, Belkin and Dervin at the beginning of this article is that becoming aware of a gap in understanding may be dependent on a certain threshold being reached in the size of the gap, a gap large enough to trip the individual into awareness of the gap. This will be discussed in a second article.

Acknowledgements--The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Professor T. D. Wilson and Dr David Ellis of the University of Sheffield.

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