Activity of Understanding a Problem during Interactionwith an “Enabling” Information Retrieval System:Modeling Information Flow

Charles ColeCommunication Studies, Concordia University, 7141 Sherbrooke Street West, BR-111, Montreal, Quebec,Canada H4B 1R6. E-mail: cbcole@alcor.concordia.ca

This article is about the mental coding processes in-volved in the flow of “information” when the user isinteracting with an “enabling” information retrieval (IR)system. An “enabling” IR system is designed to stimu-late the user’s grasping towards a higher understandingof the information need/problem/task that brought theuser to the IR system. C. Shannon’s (1949/1959) model ofthe flow of information, and K. R. Popper’s (1975) 3worlds concept are used to diagram the flow of infor-mation between the user and system when the userreceives a stimulating system message, with particularemphasis on the decoding and encoding operations in-volved as the user processes the message. The keydifference between the model of information flow pro-posed here and the linear transmission, receiver-ori-ented model now in use is that we assume that users ofa truly interactive, “enabling” IR system are primarilymessage senders, not passive receivers of the message,because they must create a new message back to thesystem, based on a reconceptualization of their informa-tion need, while they are “online” interacting with thesystem.

Introduction

In any communication situation, there is a sender of amessage and a receiver. The intention of a sender sending acommunication is to affect the behavior of the receiver.However slight it may be, the intention often meets withfailure. This is especially true in a communication situationwhere the user, because of the circumstances of the com-munication, has only partial knowledge about the subject ofthe message. When the various disciplines take on the taskof designing information retrieval systems, they are con-fronted with this dilemma, but they react differently depend-ing on their orientation. They may focus on the sender and

production of the message (the arts), the transmission of themessage/signal (engineering), or the message receiver (psy-chology). And this focus may shift over time, influenced, forexample, by technological innovations.

In the last 20 years, communication research in generalhas made “a shift from the object and the signal to thesubject or the receiver” of the message/signal (de Mey,1982, p. 16). Part of this shift was in reaction to Shannon’s(1949/1959) epoch defining mathematical theory of com-munication which placed information production in thehands of the message sender—e.g., the author of a book—while the role of the receiver—the reader or the informationuser—was simply to decode the author’s text back into itsoriginal message form. Fairthorne (1954), for example, ob-jected to Shannon’s passive interpretation (or misinterpre-tation) of the receiver’s function. He believed that informa-tion was “an attribute of the receiver’s knowledge andinterpretation of the signal, not of the sender’s nor someomniscient observer’s nor of the signal itself” (Fairthorne,1954, p. 255). In succeeding decades, this view has gainedground, and we are now in what de Mey calls the cognitivestage, where “information is seen as supplementary or com-plementary to a conceptual system that represents the infor-mation processor’s knowledge or model of his world” (deMey, 1982, p. 5).

According to the cognitive view, the subject-receiver re-ceives the signal—or in de Mey’s terms, the “object”—from averbal or written source, then “organizes” the signal (de Mey,1982, p. 17) into an “interpreted” message, a message whichmay or may not be the intended message sent by the author ofthe verbal or written source. Here, the receiver is no longerassigned the passive role as a simple decoder of the sender/author’s message, but is seen as someone who “constructs” hisor her own message (Dervin & Nilan, 1986) from the receivedsignal. As such, according to this view, the communicationsystem between any given sender and receiver is recipientcontrolled (Belkin, 1984, p. 112).

Received April 22, 1998; revised October 5, 1998; accepted October 18,1998.

© 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE. 50(6):544–552, 1999 CCC 0002-8231/99/060544-09

In IR research, however, the control accorded by thecognitive school to the receiver of the signal has beenmisinterpreted to mean that the user of the IR system onlyreceives messages and the system only sends messages.This is not the case. “[T]he cognitive viewpoint,” arguesIngwersen, “suggests that the machine or the system maysimilarly act as a recipient”; and “[t]his interchange ofpositions makes the [cognitive] viewpoint a forceful theo-retical foundation for IR interaction” (Ingwersen, 1996, p. 5;cf. also, the cognitive oriented, interactive models of Belkin,Cool, Stein, & Thiel, 1995; Saracevic, 1996a). In fact, thecognitive view requires that both user and system assumeboth sender and receiver roles during the interaction be-cause of its basic notion of what information is, and its basicnotion of what the effect of a message on the recipient is.

Because of these basic notions, the purpose of cognitiveoriented IR research has been to make the users of suchsystems, via the informational power of the system’s mes-sages to the user, “better able to understand and/or managethe problem which initiated the information system” (Bel-kin, 1984, p. 112). Since such a system is quite differentfrom traditional systems, and is even quite different from“intelligent” systems (where the system makes “inferences”based on its remembered knowledge of the user and theuser’s previous searches on the system (Brooks, 1987, p.367; cf. also, Croft, 1987, p. 249), we will use the term“enabling.” An “enabling” system stimulates the user to“inference.” The term comes from Saracevic (1975, p. 326;cf. also, Kuhlthau, 1996, p. 93) and Saracevic’s definition ofthe intent of user-system interaction: “To affect the cogni-tive state of the user for effective use of information inconnection with an application at hand” (Saracevic, 1996b,p. 211).

This article is about the dimensions of the two-way flowof information while a user is interacting with so-called (byPopper, 1975) “objective” representations of knowledgesent as “messages” to the user by an “enabling” IR systemwhere the specific purpose of the “enabling” is to “stimu-late” the user’s “grasping” for a higher level of understand-ing of the problem, task, or information need that broughtthe user to the IR system in the first place. Once the higherlevel is achieved, the user is “enabled” to create and sendback to the system another message, a message that isfundamentally different from the one contained in his or heroriginal query to the system.

The article is divided into four sections. In Section A, thecognitive view of two-way information flow during user-system interaction is contrasted with the model of one-wayinformation flow in traditional IR design. In Section B,Popper’s (1975) three worlds concept is used to model auser processing a message from an “enabling” IR system, ashe or she is grasping at a higher level of understanding ofthe problem, task, or information need.

In Section C, the information flow between the user andan interactive IR system is modeled, adapting Shannon’s(1949/1959, p. 5) famous communication flow diagram sothat the user is represented as the message sender/creator

rather than receiver. And in Section D, the user’s mentalprocesses, upon receipt of a transforming message from thesystem, are divided into two coding systems.

A. The Traditional and Cognitive Views of IRInformation Flow

When examining user-system interaction, the traditionaland cognitive perspectives view the same series of events indifferent ways, which leads to different models of informa-tion flow between system and user. In both models, the userapproaches an IR system with an information problem/need,conceptualized by the user before going online. The searchterms the user selects to form the query to the system aresurrogates for, or representations of, this information prob-lem/need. Once online, the user sends the query to thesystem, the system searches the database looking for docu-ment matches to the user’s input (i.e., the query), then thesystem sends back some sort of “initial,” “interim,” or “test”output. Both models expect either the user or the system toeither manually or automatically revise the initial output viarelevance judgments (Spink & Saracevic, 1998, p. 254). Theinteraction ends when the system produces the revised out-put and the user leaves the system.

The traditional perspective views the initial, interim out-put and the final output when the user leaves the system asa linear transmission model of information flow betweensystem and user, while the cognitive perspective views the“interim” output, before revision, as the source of severalfeedback loops. The traditional model, on the other hand,does not recognize feedback loops (Saracevic, 1996a;Spink, 1996b). Consequently, from the cognitive point ofview, “interaction is not directly depicted in the traditionalmodel at all” (Saracevic, 1996a, p. 3), even though feedbackis. Spink, Saracevic, and Losee explain the difference be-tween the traditional and cognitive views of feedback interms of negative and positive feedback.

The concept of negative feedback, which in moderntimes emerged from the field of cybernetics after WorldWar II, was developed as an error correction or “deviationcontracting” device (Spink & Saracevic, 1998, p. 251) to beused in “self-regulating or self-adapting systems” such ascomputing machines (Spink & Losee, 1996, p. 37). For thisparticular purpose, the information contained within thefeedback signal was “objective and mechanistic” (Spink &Losee, 1996, p. 37). Positive feedback, on the other hand, isdesigned to stimulate thinking and to amplify deviation. Forthis particular purpose—and one can envisage many fore-seeable purposes, among them truly interactive IR sys-tems—the information contained within the feedback signalhas both “cognitive and situational attributes” (Spink &Saracevic, 1998, p. 251). The difference between the twoconcepts of feedback is due to (i) different conceptions ofthe role or purpose of feedback and to (ii) the differentconcepts of information contained within the feedback sig-nals. Each of these points has important implications formodeling information flow and designing IR systems.

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(i) Different Concepts of Feedback

It is assumed in the traditional model of information flowthat the user does not reconceptualize the problem, task, orinformation need online while interacting with the systembecause

—the user’s query to the system is considered to be a“precise statement” of what the user “expects relevant doc-uments to contain” (Spink & Losee, 1996, p. 45); and

—the user’s information need remains invariable overthe course of the interaction (Ingwersen, 1996, p. 11).

Because of these two traditional model assumptions, thetraditional model views the user-system “information sys-tem” as a closed system, with feedback being limited toachieving “query optimality” for the conceptualization ofthe information need of the user when he or she logged ontothe system. In other words, the user inputs only one essen-tial query or message during one session and all feedbackduring that session is to improve the user’s original queryonly (Spink & Losee, 1996, p. 44; cf. also, Beaulieu, Rob-ertson, & Rasmussen, 1996, p. 87; Haverkamp & Gauch,1998, p. 304; Saracevic, 1996a, p. 3; Spink & Saracevic,1997, p. 744). The modifications to the user’s query envis-aged by the traditional model, therefore, do not constitute anew message back to the system, but are only the initialmessage corrected for error.

Contrary to the traditional model assumptions, the cog-nitive view assumes that in many cases

—the user has great difficulty conceptually defining hisor her information need, as well as difficulty in labeling it(Belkin, 1984, p. 115; Taylor, 1968); and

—the user’s information need evolves over the course ofthe interaction as the user comes to understand it better(Belkin et al., 1995, p. 379; cf. also, Bates, 1989).

This is an entirely different view of user-system interac-tion. In the traditional model, for example, the psychologi-cal (cognitive) relevance effects described by Harter (1992;1996, p. 39) are unaccounted for, whereas in the cognitivemodel such effects are accounted for (e.g., Saracevic &Kantor, 1997, p. 536).

(ii) Different Concepts of Information

The cognitive view of what constitutes user-system in-teraction is an adaptation of feedback models from cyber-netics and the social sciences, but the truly “evolutionary”determinant is its view of the effect of the interaction on theuser, which in turn is based on the cognitive view’s defini-tion of information (Spink, 1997, p. 737).

The cognitive view defines information as “informing”or “inward shaping,” from the Latin word “formare”—“toshape or to form” (Pratt, 1977, p. 215; 1998, p. 27). One ofthe most cited cognitive school definitions of information isthe one given by Brookes (1980a, p. 131)—“that which

modifies knowledge structure.” Ingwersen (1996) andSaracevic (1996a; 1996b) use the term “cognitive state” todescribe roughly the same thing as knowledge structure andinformation need combined—i.e., the information need andthe state of knowledge of the user share the same roots, andtogether with the problem/task and situation/organizationalfactors of the user, these structures together determine theframe of reference or cognitive state of the user when he orshe interacts with an IR system (Ingwersen, 1996).

The cognitive school’s definition of information deter-mines, in part, how it views information flow between a userand a system when the system sends a message to the user(the interim output) in response to the user’s query. Accord-ing to Ingwersen, there are two types of messages from anIR system: A message that affects the cognitive state of theuser at the “linguistic surface level” only and a message thattransforms the user’s cognitive state (Ingwersen, 1996, p.10). The cognitive viewpoint regards messages that do nottransform the user’s cognitive state as “signs,” signs that areonly transformed into information when they transform theuser’s current cognitive state (Ingwersen, 1996, p. 6).

Spink and Saracevic’s (1997) stratified model of IRinteraction contains the same sort of surface and deeperlevels described in Ingwersen. At the surface level, theuser-system interaction leads to searching and matchingbetween information tokens in the user’s query and in thesystem, the sort of thing that occurs in the traditional modelwhen the user adjusts his or her query after receiving linearfeedback from the system. Spink and Saracevic (1997)divide the deeper layer, where the user’s cognitive state istransformed when the user is being “informed” by a systemmessage, into sub-levels: The cognitive and situational. Atthe cognitive level, users interact with cognitive structuresin the texts produced by the system, and they also processthese texts at this level (e.g., when making relevance judg-ments). At the situational level, the user’s task, problemsituation, or information need is represented in the interac-tion process; this level may also be referred to by the userduring relevance judgments (Spink & Saracevic, 1997, pp.744, 745). (The fourth level in the Spink and Saracevicstratified model of interaction is the “affective” level.)

The four levels in this stratified interaction model com-municate with each other when the user receives a messagefrom the system, but although the “selection process isrealized and manifested on the surface level” (Spink &Saracevic, 1997, p. 745), the modification of the user’scognitive state, which stimulates the user to reconceptualizehis or her problem/need or task so that they can constructand send a truly new message back to the system, occurs atthe deeper three levels.

The specific objective of an enabling-cognitive orientedIR system is to send a message to the user that “stimulates”the transformation of the user’s cognitive state, so that theuser’s new message back to the system represents a higherlevel of understanding of the problem or the task thatbrought him/her to the system. The rest of the article isabout the modeling of the information flow and mental

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processes involved in a user being stimulated to a higherlevel of understanding of his or her problem, task, or infor-mation need as a result of an “enabling” message from an IRsystem.

B. Popper’s Three Worlds

We begin by externally modeling the user’s activity ofinteracting with an “enabling” IR system, using Karl Pop-per’s three worlds concept (principally outlined in Popper,1975). Popper’s concept describes the interplay between theuser’s second world “grasping” for understanding and his orher succession of “states” of understanding due to interac-tion with third-world ideas or theories. Popper’s threeworlds concept is open to interpretation. We assume whenPopper talks about the ideas contained in ordinary utter-ances as being “the third-world significance of the informa-tion or the message conveyed in what has been said, orwritten” (Popper, 1975, p. 157), that he is also referring toa person’s states of understanding, especially if they arewritten down or conceptualized as a user does when he orshe comes up with search terms that form the query to theIR system (but cf. Popper’s (1975, p. 154) definition of thesecond world for a possible contrary interpretation). We willalso assume the stimulation of third-world states of under-standing to be the essential activity of an “enabling” IRsystem. Popper’s theory describes high-level scientific un-derstanding (i.e., the finished theories contained within abook or article). But the theory:

(a) includes “wrong” theory formation,(b) describes the process of reaching an understanding,

which is common to us all (Popper, 1975, p. 156), and(c) emphasizes the “conjectures” and stages involved in

coming up with an idea, solution, or theory (Popper,1975, p. 164).

Because of this, the theory has wider implications for de-scribing the process of an ordinary person as he or she iscoming closer and closer to an understanding of someproblem via interaction with an “enabling” IR system.

When first beginning to solve a problem, the individualmust make a conception of it, even if the conception isweak. The scientist, for example, would investigate the“background” to his or her “problem situation,” which isobtained from collecting and analyzing third-world knowl-edge representations (Popper, 1975, p. 165; cf. also Hjør-land, 1997, pp. 166, 167). An ordinary individual mightcollect his or her thoughts together on the subject of theproblem by asking, “What do I know about this subject?”and then “investigate” the problem situation in this way.The answer to this question would be the individual’s firstconception of the problem.

The user arrives at an IR system with this first conceptionof the problem, which Popper labels “P1.” For the sake ofargument, let us say “P1” is written down on a piece ofpaper. Popper calls this a “paper and pencil operation”; the

writing down of the problem allows the individual to dividethe problem up into structural units which make the problemeasier to handle (Popper, 1975, p. 168). The user uses thesestructured units of the problem to form an initial query tothe system.

The user’s query to the IR system brings back citationsthat (1) have a first-world physical form in the flickeringletters on the computer screen. These flickering lights also(2) conceptually represent third-world “virtual” objects—signifying ideas, concepts, and theories. However, as theuser interacts with the IR system, reading over the citationsin the electronic database, various other ideas and informa-tion processes are stimulated and “transmitted” throughsecond-world mental processes of the individual’s brain.

After a while, the individual arrives at a platform or“state” of understanding, which Popper calls a “tentativetheory” (“TT”). In other words, TT is a “conjecture” (Pop-per, 1975, p. 164). A conjecture, either written down or not,is a third-world knowledge object (Popper, 1975, p. 165).After the individual critically examines the “conjecture” forpurposes of “error elimination” (“EE”), which includes in-vestigating and weighing evidence, P2 emerges, which is ahigher platform or “state” of understanding of P1: “‘P2’ isthe problem situation as it emerges from our first criticalattempt to solve our problems. It leads up to our secondattempt (and so on)” (Popper, 1975, p. 164). The process isrepeated until the individual has solved the problem or cango no further (for recent research along these lines, cf.,Campbell and van Rijsbergen, 1996; Mizzaro, 1996; cf.also, Spink, 1996a, p. 275).

Popper put this method of problem solution into a for-mula, which he called “the schema of conjectures andrefutations” (Popper, 1975, p. 168):

P1 3 TT 3 EE 3 P2 and so on.

(In another version of the schema, Popper added a verticalaspect to “TT,” indicating “the multiplicity of the tentativesolutions, the multiplicity of the trials” (Popper, 1975, p. 243).)

The essence of this formula is that the process of solvinga problem is a back and forth movement or “feedback” loopbetween the second and third worlds—the world two ofmental processes and “grasping” for understanding interact-ing with world three “states” or platforms of understanding,which can be written down (but do not have to be) as if theywere outside of the individual, as virtual “objects” (Rumel-hart, Smolensky, McClelland, & Hinton, 1986, p. 46).

However, there are two types of third-world virtual ob-jects involved in problem solution as Popper has describedit. They are either:

—the individual’s own, that the individual producesafter reflection (as in Popper’s “schema of conjectures andrefutations” [P1, TT, EE, P2]

—or others produced by the IR system to represent“fragments” of the world of knowledge contained in thedatabase.

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These two types of third world objects can be diagrammed,as in Figure 1. Here, P1, TT, EE, P2 are third-world objectsthat are conjectures, ideas, or theories of the individual, asthey are conceptualized either on paper or in the individu-al’s mind. The IR System’s Representations, on the otherhand, of which we have indicated three only, are third-worldobjects created by the IR system, and represent the system’sview of the fragment of the world of knowledge the indi-vidual wishes to access.

Popper did not mean the elements or stages of his “P1,TT, EE, P2” schema to be all the same. However, let usassume that all the stages are all the same with regards tohow “information” flows in and out, but that third-world“objects” conceived by the individual are different fromthird-world “objects” created by the IR system. If we focuson the user for the moment, what might the flow of infor-mation look like given these assumptions?

C. Shannon’s Sender-Message-Receiver Modelof Information Flow

Although information science and related disciplineshave an awkward relationship with Shannon, which haslimited its practical impact (Finn & Roberts, 1984, p. 454;Zunde, 1981, p. 346; cf. also, Belkin & Vickery, 1985; Cole,1993), information science still refers to Shannon’s theoryof communication in its attempt to model the flow of infor-mation (e.g., Losee, 1997; Tague-Sutcliffe, 1995). A sim-plified version of the model is the following:

Sender 3 Encoder 3

Signaltransmission

(noise) 3 Decoder 3 Receiver.

In information science, the sender is usually equated withthe author of the books and articles stored in library, whohas encoded his or her thoughts into print form for widerdissemination. The reader of these books or articles is meantto receive the signal (the printed text), and translate it backinto the message intended by the author. The message,according to this view, is the author’s “thoughts” (Brookes,1980a, p. 127; Sperber & Wilson, 1986, p. 5).

When interacting with an “enabling” or “intelligent” IRsystem, this model of the flow of information breaks downfor various reasons. The one that concerns us here is that itdescribes a one-way information flow only. (Shannon wasnot interested in the reaction of the person receiving thesignal at the destination but only in reproducing at thedestination, as faithfully as possible, the message selected atthe source (Shannon, 1949/1959, p. 3, and the diagram ofthe model on p. 37). The diagram establishes the “real” endof the information flow model at the “correcting device” justbefore the destination (cf. also, Losee, 1997, pp. 263, 264).)As Saracevic (1975), citing Wiener (1961), says: “They[source-destination] can switch roles”—that is, the receivercan turn around and become the sender after receiving amessage—but Shannon’s model treats these as two separatecommunication situations.

In a two-way information flow during a user-IR systeminteraction, the user is both the receiver of a signal from theIR system and the sender of a message back to the system,and the user switches roles in the middle of coding. TheShannon model could be modified to model this dual roleaspect of the user-IR interaction by starting the model at adifferent place, as follows:

(noise) signal decoding3 Receiver3

Sender3message encoding3 signal transmission.

Here, the individual using the IR system receives a signalfrom the system. He or she must decode it—that is, translatethe signal back into the intended message—then he or shemust send his or her own message to the IR system byencoding it into a signal for transmission.

As shown in Figure 2, the individual as both receiver andsender can be melded onto Popper’s schema of conjecturesand refutations (as we have verticalized the schema in Fig.1).

Figure 2 portrays the user of an “intelligent” IR system asboth a receiver of a signal and a sender of a message. Theuser is portrayed as decoding the signal from the systemthen encoding the same message into signal form so that itcan be sent back to the system. However, the IR system-userinteraction is, in a very broad sense of the word, like aconversation (Saracevic, Mokros, & Su, 1990, p. 51; Spink& Saracevic, 1998, p. 254); the individual is having aconversation with the world of knowledge represented inthe IR system being accessed. When you are conversingwith someone else, what you say to that person cannot be

FIG. 1. A verticalization of Popper’s schema of conjectures and refuta-tions, and how each stage of the schema interacts with third-world con-ceptual “objects” (the IR system’s representation) obtained from the user’sinteraction with an “enabling” or “intelligent” IR system.

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completely divorced from what that person has just said toyou, but it cannot be the same either.

There is a similar requirement in user-IR system inter-action when the purpose of the IR system is to “enable” orfacilitate the information processing (understanding) of theindividual. The individual does not receive a signal, decodeit, then send back a message that is completely unrelated towhat has just been received from the IR system (unless theindividual decides to end one subject interaction and startanother). Nor does the user send back exactly the samemessage.

We can go further than this. In the discussion as we arepresenting it, using Popper’s three worlds theory of knowl-edge formation, the second-world “grasping” for under-standing occurs between third-world “states” of understand-ing. Indeed, in order to be successful, the interaction withthe IR system must encourage or facilitate the grasping(Saracevic, 1996b, p. 211). Can we define this “grasping”more specifically in terms of coding operations?

D. The Encoding-Decoding Systems in World 2

When a user of an interactive, “enabling” IR system re-ceives a signal back from the system, two coding-like pro-cesses occur that Brookes believes are in different dimensions.[1] One is a straight “decoding” of the signal in a linear fashioninto the author’s intended message (the author’s “thoughts”);[2] the other is “encoding” the physical signal into the user’sthoughts and interpretations, which Brookes believes is loga-rithmic: “On attending to the verbalization of others, I simul-

taneously [1] analyze the words I hear or see (syntactically/digitally/linearly) [and] [2] judge the import of their relation-ships and content to the issue (semantically/analogically/logarithmically)” (Brookes, 1977, p. 62; numbers in squarebrackets added; cf. also, Brookes, 1980b).

In practical terms, the user receives a signal from an IRsystem and asks two types of coding questions: [1] “Whatdoes this signal mean, objectively?” (i.e., “What is the IRsystem trying to tell me or teach me?”); and [2] “What doesthe signal mean, subjectively, in terms of my informationneed” (i.e., “What does the signal tell me about my need sothat I can reformulate my next query to the system in a moreeffective manner?”). For ease of analysis, let us assumethese two types of coding do not occur in parallel, asBrookes suggests, and that each can be categorized as aseparate processing system, which we will call System [A]and System [B].

In System [A], when the user receives a signal from the IRsystem, the signal contains some sort of representation of theworld of knowledge. With traditional IR systems, this repre-sentation would consist of citations to articles and books, orcitation “output.” In “enabling” IR systems, the representationwould consist of a device that would “enable” the user to“grasp” at a higher level of understanding of his or her prob-lem, task, or information need. The user of the “enabling” IRsystem must first decode this signal from the IR system backinto the message the IR system “sent,” and at the end of theprocess, the user must encode his or her “responding” messageinto a new message back to the IR system.

FIG. 2. Overlaying Shannon’s model of information flow on Popper’s schema of conjectures and refutations, emphasizing the dual receiver-sender roleof the user.

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In between these decoding and encoding operations, inSystem [B], the user must decode and encode the message/signal just received from the IR system in terms of his or herown information need. An effective interaction with aninteractive system will modify the user’s conception of thatinformation need: “The user may find elements in what thesystem presents that lead him or her to reformulate orreconsider the expression of the information need or todevelop a new understanding of the information need itself”(Allen, 1996, p. 188).

In the following chart, we will summarize the two sys-tems’ operations and divide each into its decoding andencoding parts:

[A.1] After initiating the interaction with the query, the user receivesa signal back from the IR system. The user must begin processing thesignal by decoding it back into its original message form.

The user must then “transduce” the decoded IR message intohis or her own “private interpretations or thoughts,”

[B.2] by decoding the IR message in terms of the user’sinformation need, e.g., writing an undergraduate term pa-per, writing a report, etc; and[B.3] by encoding the IR message in terms of the user’sinformation need.

[A.4] Finally, the user must encode into a signal the message he orshe wishes to send back to the IR system, which becomes the newmessage back to the system.

FIG. 3. The two systems’ decoding-encoding operations shown inside the box (System [B]) and outside the box (System [A]). The signal (S) from theIR system is first decoded outside the box, then encoded (inside the box); the user’s information need (I–N) is decoded and encoded inside the box; andfinally the user’s message (M) back to the system is encoded into a signal outside the box. Each of these coding processes may involve further interactionwith the IR system, indicated by the back and forth arrows.

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In the above chart, we have nested System [B] insideSystem [A]. In Figure 3, we apply the chart to Popper’s“schema of conjectures and refutations,” nesting System [B]inside a box and System [A] outside the box. We believethis separation of coding operations begins to represent thesecond-world “grasping” for understanding that an interac-tive, “enabling” IR system must set in motion in the user.

Conclusion

We began by using the assumptions of the emergingcognitive view of user-system interaction to create a modelof information flow between user and IR system when thesystem is an “enabling” IR system. The cognitive model ofinformation flow is based on several principles. The modelmust describe true interaction between user and system,where the flow of information is two-way, not one-way as itis usually presented in the traditional model. In order for thesystem message to become a feedback loop, the interactionmust go deeper than the surface, query reformulation leveldescribed in the traditional model. The user must respond tothe system message by reconceptualizing his or her infor-mation need/problem task “online,” during the interaction,then construct a new message back to the system that isfundamentally different from the user’s initial formulationof the query. An enabling IR system must “stimulate” thisactivity for purposes of facilitating the user’s grasping for ahigher level of understanding of the information need/prob-lem or task that brought the user to the system seekinginformation. The purpose of this article was to look at theinteraction between the user and such a system in terms ofinformation flow, and then begin to describe the coding.

The article then modeled the coding processes involvedin two-way information flow, but from the user’s position ofmessage receiver and message creator/sender. When a userof an interactive, “enabling” IR system receives a signalback from the system, the user asks himself/herself twotypes of coding questions: “What does this signal mean,objectively?” (i.e., “What is the IR system trying to tell meor teach me?”); and “What does the signal mean subjec-tively, in terms of my information need?” (i.e., “What doesthe signal tell me about my need so that I can reformulatemy next query to the system in a more effective manner?”).We believe these two questions can form the basis ofseparate coding systems, with one nested inside the other (asshown in Fig. 3).

The key to our model (in Fig. 3) of the information flowfor “enabling” IR systems is the assumption that the userswitches roles half-way through the coding process, fromthat of the receiver of a signal (which the user must decode)to that of the sender of a message (which the user mustencode so that it can be transmitted to, and understood by,the community (of scholars or by the instructor marking theundergraduate essay)). The user, however, is primarily amessage creator/sender not a signal receiver (as is oftenpresumed to be the case in information science). We haveindicated the primacy of the user’s sender role by putting

the “Message” almost at the end of the coding procedures inFigure 3, so that it is clear that the primary focus of anenabling system is to stimulate the user’s cognitive state sothat a new message can be sent back to the system.

In the past, users approached an IR system expecting tobecome informed, but they knew that the system was onlydirecting them to potential information. With the Internet,users will expect to become informed online, during theinteraction.

Acknowledgments

The research for this article was funded by the SocialSciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada(SSHRC), Fellowship Award 756-97-0278, and StandardResearch Grant, File 410-97-0366.

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