The Situatedness of the Seeker: Toward a Heideggerian Understanding of Information Seeking
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While recent scholarship in library and information studies, such as the work of John M. Budd and Ronald E. Day, explores how the thought of philosopher Martin Heidegger may provide a model for understanding the nature of information, none of this scholarship has yet addressed how Heidegger’s thought can be used specifically to conceptualize the process of information seeking. In my paper, I argue, first, that several representative models of information seeking are philosophically inadequate in light of the consequences of what Day calls the conduit metaphor. Second, I argue that the concept of Dasein, a phenomenological description of human experience found in Heidegger’s book Being and Time, can be used to develop an information-seeking model that avoids instantiating the conduit metaphor. Instead, my analysis shows how Dasein permits a new conception of the information seeker, whose situatedness provides a new understanding of the activity of information seeking and the concept of information more broadly.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.065 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.020 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".