Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Introduction: Why Context?

2018; Morgan & Claypool Publishers; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/978-3-031-02313-2_1

1947-9468

Naresh Kumar Agarwal,

Imagine that you are a typical information seeker (if there is such a person), and that you have just encountered a need for information. It could be in an everyday life situation at home—like booking an air ticket, buying new shoes, or deciding on a college—or at a work or study task, like working on a project or assignment. You will likely then choose to start looking for information to fulfill your need. Your search for information may be from people—friends or colleagues or a reference librarian (either face-to-face, using asynchronous communication such as email, or synchronous communication such as phone or instant messaging), from physical books or manuals, or from online websites and search interfaces such as Google or Wikipedia (Agarwal, 2011; Agarwal, Xu, and Poo, 2011). You may go online first (Agarwal, Xu, and Poo, 2011) (on a smartphone or computer), using an app or a browser, to a search engine such as Google or a site such as Wikipedia, social media such as Facebook or Twitter, or ask Siri, Cortana, or Alexa. You might decide to email or to text a friend or colleague using SMS, iMessage, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, SnapChat, Allo, etc. so as to reach out without completely interrupting what your friend or colleague (the source) might be doing at the moment. You might call this source using your phone, on WhatsApp, Messenger, Skype, or Facetime Audio, or speak to the person over video—using Facetime, Google Hangout, Skype, or GoToMeeting. Finally, and increasingly often as a last resort (sometimes even when the person is within geographical proximity or in the same room—see the discussion at CollegeNet, 2015), you might reach out to the person face-to-face. You might even decide to seek information collaboratively as a pair with a teammate, as a team or a group, or reach out to a community of people for answers—on Facebook, Twitter, or other online communities like blogs, Quora.com, Yahoo Answers, etc. As you can see, your choice of action, and the source or channel to use will be based on specific contextual factors.