Topic Modeling the Reading and Writing Behavior of Information Foragers
Jaimie Murdock
TL;DR
This paper uses topic modeling to analyze how reading and writing behaviors influence personal knowledge construction, examining case studies from Darwin, Jefferson, and neuroscience to reveal interactions between individual and collective information foraging.
Contribution
It introduces a novel application of LDA topic modeling to study the dynamic interaction between reading and writing behaviors in knowledge development across different contexts.
Findings
Darwin's reading influenced his drafts and revisions of The Origin of Species.
Reading and writing behaviors interact to shape personal knowledge bases.
Collective information environments impact individual knowledge construction.
Abstract
The general problem of "information foraging" in an environment about which agents have incomplete information has been explored in many fields, including cognitive psychology, neuroscience, economics, finance, ecology, and computer science. In all of these areas, the searcher aims to enhance future performance by surveying enough of existing knowledge to orient themselves in the information space. Individuals can be viewed as conducting a cognitive search in which they must balance exploration of ideas that are novel to them against exploitation of knowledge in domains in which they are already expert. In this dissertation, I present several case studies that demonstrate how reading and writing behaviors interact to construct personal knowledge bases. These studies use LDA topic modeling to represent the information environment of the texts each author read and wrote. Three studies…
Click any figure to enlarge with its caption.
Figure 1
Figure 2
Figure 3
Figure 4
Figure 5
Figure 6
Figure 7
Figure 8
Figure 9
Figure 10
Figure 11
Figure 12
Figure 13
Figure 14
Figure 15
Figure 16
Figure 17
Figure 18
Figure 19
Figure 20
Figure 21
Figure 22
Figure 23
Figure 24
Figure 25
Figure 26
Figure 27
Figure 28
Figure 29
Figure 30
Figure 31
Figure 32
Figure 33
Figure 34Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsAdvanced Text Analysis Techniques · Topic Modeling · Computational and Text Analysis Methods
MethodsLinear Discriminant Analysis