The readership context
two examples above because there is often
an intention that they should carry information.
There is no reason to assume that
a male butterfly means to inform either a
predator or a potential mate when he flaps
his wings. By contrast, a message designed
to communicate has two informing
contexts: that of the author and that of
the reader. These correspond to the two
points described by Shannon and Weaver
[9, p. 31] when they stated that ‘The fundamental
problem of communication is
that of reproducing at one point either exactly
or approximately a message selected
at another point.’ However, Shannon and
Weaver were merely talking about the difficulties
involved in transmitting a signal
from a sender to a receiver. If that signal is to
be a message, it is necessary for the sender
to be an author, or the recipient to be a reader,
or both. Characteristics of these two contexts,
and the message itself, are described
below.
The readership context
As Meadow and Yuan noted, ‘Most views of
the difference between data and information
… depend on the recipient.’ [10, p. 701] The
information derived from a message by a
reader depends on a wide range of factors,
all of which affect the reader’s understanding
of that message. Some of these are listed
below:
Geographical – nation, culture, language,
physical community.
Social – interests, pastimes.
Educational – level of education, subjects
studied.
Professional – area of professionalism,
career history.
The different contexts overlap. A mathematical
treatise will be understood in the
same way by both Russian and American
mathematicians. A Birmingham newspaper
will be more informative to Jamaican and
Punjabi immigrants living in Solihull than it
would to a tenth generation cockney in
Lambeth. To understand what makes sense
to a reader, therefore, it is necessary to understand
the structure of the society of which he
or she is a part [11].
The authorial context
As well as sharing the characteristics of the
readership context, the authorial context has
an additional property: that of intention. Two
possible states of intention are assumed:
Message intended to convey information
The author produces the text with the intention
of informing the reader. This is the usual
authorial context, in which a text ‘is a collection
of signs purposefully structured by a
sender with the intention of changing the
image-structure of a recipient’ [12, p. 20]. The
closer an author’s context is to that of a reader,
the greater is the chance that the author’s
work will be informative. In exceptional circumstances,
an author may choose to convey
more than one message in a given text
(see Appendix).
Message not intended to convey information
The author ascribes no meaning to the message
of the text: any meaning is derived within
the readership context. Examples include
the predictions of fortune-tellers and output
from artificial intelligence programs such as
Eliza [13].
Information as a resource or
commodity: getting the message
Messages are classified according to how focused they are. Traditionally, information scientists have dealt largely with focused messages. Highly focused messages are ones in which the context for interpretation is very specific, making ambiguities difficult or impossible. The most obvious example would be a mathematical document, but other examples include command line computer interfaces and technical publications.
Looser (but still focused) messages would include descriptive works and histories, which will be interpreted according to the reader’s culture and experience.
A less positive example would be poorly written ocuments [4], which may be confusing, ambiguous, or misleading: a typical contemporary example of this is email. Totally loose messages would have no obvious interpretation in any context. An example is surrealist literature. In many ways this model is similar to the communication model proposed by Jakobson
[14]. This too comprises three components (addresser, addressee, and message).
Because it deals with the intentional ransfer of information, however, it places greater emphasis on the means by which messages are transmitted, and excludes a great deal of information sources.
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