Life is Suffering: Thrownness, Duhkha, Gaps, and the Origin of Existential-Spiritual Needs for Information
Bibliographic record
Abstract
LIS scholars have spent considerable time investigating the incipient stages of information seeking: the so-called “information need” as well as a host of other motivators. A study of twenty New Kadampa Buddhists, whose experiences were collected through semi-structured interviews, sought to explore their spiritual information practices and their motivations for engaging in such behaviour. An analysis of these interviews suggests that Martin Heidegger’s concept of thrownness can be paralleled with Buddhism’s First Noble Truth and Dervin’s gap metaphor, all which identify existential-level faults as inherent to the human condition. This paper offers that it is these closely-related problematic elements of human existence that are the origin of spiritual and existential motivations for engaging in spiritual information practices.Les chercheurs en bibliothéconomie et sciences de l’information ont passé beaucoup de temps à étudier les premières étapes de la recherche d'information : le soi-disant «besoin d'information» ainsi qu'une foule d'autres facteurs de motivation. L’étude de vingt nouveaux bouddhistes kadampa, dont les expériences ont été recueillies à travers des entretiens semistructurés, a cherché à explorer leurs pratiques d'information spirituelle et les motivations de leur comportement. Une analyse de ces entrevues suggère que le concept de l’être-jeté de Martin Heidegger peut être mis en parallèle avec la Première Noble Vérité du Bouddhisme et la métaphore de la lacune de Dervin, qui identifient les failles au niveau existentiel comme inhérentes à la condition humaine. Cet article propose que ce sont ces éléments problématiques étroitement liés de l'existence humaine qui sont à l'origine des motivations spirituelles et existentielles pour s'engager dans des pratiques d'information spirituelle.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.041 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| 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".