[Sigia-l] Applying Information Foraging Models

[Victor Lombardi]

I've only made it part way through the literature so
far, but I don't expect to see information foraging
explained as a design approach. What I've read
examines use of artifacts to determine if foraging is
a suitable model to explain user behavior. It's
grounded in psychology (not, um, philosophy),
particularly the workings of memory, and so the
experiments result in conclusions about users, not
design practice.

That said, one could reverse their ideas and apply the
concepts to design. For example, the idea that we form
associations in memory that are related to the
probabilities of word occurences and word
co-occurences could be used to create labels. There
are databases of these occurences, such as the Tipster
corpus. I don't know of anyone who has tried this yet.

Victor


=====
Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2003 08:14:22 -0700
From: Peter Merholz <peterme at peterme.com>
To: SIGIA <sigia-l at asis.org>
Subject: [Sigia-l] Applying Information Foraging
Models

SIGIA-Ellers--

So, I've been looking at information foraging research
and studies to 
see if
I could apply them to some real-world problems.

A great overview of IF research has been put together
by Victor:
<http://tinyurl.com/f8cy>

While I appreciate what the basic models offer in
terms of explaining 
user
behavior ("patches" of information, weighing of
"costs", the influence 
of a
strong "scent"), I'm having trouble in getting it to
make sense for me 
in
practical terms. As in, how can I utilize this in my
practice? (Without
expensive computer simulations of user behavior...)

Have folks on the list attempted utilizing IF
techniques, approaches, 
and
models? Or thought about how to do so feasibly?

Thanks,

--peter


=====
Victor Lombardi
http://www.noisebetweenstations.com

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