The Information Ecosystem
How to Think About What You Are Looking For
1. What specific questions are you trying to answer? Be as specific as possible!
Example Topic: Reading Habits of Gen Z
- Do people in Gen Z read more or less than Millenials?
- Do people in Gen Z buy their books, borrow them from the library, or get them some other way?
- Are ebooks, audiobooks, or physical books the most popular among Gen Z?
- Are any genres, authors, or topics especially popular with Gen Z?
- Why? (you could wonder the answer is what it is to any of the above questions)
2. Who cares about these questions? Think about the answer for each sub-question you have individually.
- Remember that there are lots of people who have a stake in a topic: those that study it, those that are affected by it, those who have personal experience with it. All of the stakeholders are important to consider. Each of them will have authority over parts of the question.
3. What might the people who care about these questions have recorded/written down?
4. Where is this information and do you have access to it?
The Information Ecosystem
Unknowable Things:
Things might be unknowable (to you) because:
- They weren't recorded at the time they happened or they haven't happened yet (Ex: what my grandma ate for dinner exactly 100 years ago today)
- You do not have access to the information (Ex: top-secret military or company information)
- You don't have the context to understand it (Ex: things that are written in a language you don't know or in-depth mathematical modeling)
- All sorts of other reasons
Knowable Information
Examples of things that are knowable but not recorded (or written down):
- How many students are in the library right now
- Basically anything a researcher is doing research on
- Why are your classmates taking this class?
Recorded Information
Examples of things that are recorded but not organized in a way that I can easily find what I want:
- All of the papers in my apartment
- That one random Tweet I thought was funny last week but don't remember who posted it
- All of the records about lake-related accidents throughout the United States
Organized Information
Examples of information that is organized in a way that I can easily find what I want:
- Research articles in library databases
- US Census data
- A social media feed of a relevant person to my topic