Informaatiovuorovaikutus historian tutkimuksessa: tiedonlähteiden käytön ymmärtämisestä käytön tukemiseen

Abstract

In information science, the user-oriented research tradition focuses on information seeking in the context of human behavior, while the system-oriented tradition focuses more narrowly on the information retrieval. These traditions still form largely disparate research fields. As an attempt to bridge these traditions, we present a metasynthesis of studies on information interactions in the historical domain, which is related to an ongoing research project. We approach our research task by focusing on both the cognitive space of human actors with task-specific information needs requiring interpretative close-reading and reasoning, and the document space containing potentially relevant pieces of information for the task at hand. We first study information needs and interactions in real work tasks of historians to understand the desired conceptual access points into relevant information (cognitive space). Then we study historical sources from the point of view of task-specific needs at the level of text (document space). We utilize the task-based information interaction (TBII) model to conceptualize the different types of activities during interaction which are important to consider. We believe that this approach is required to learn to support complex task-based information needs extending beyond topicality.