Packages and capsules of information

There is so much information that even with computers we find it difficult to keep track of everything. For this reason alone we usually don’t directly examine the actual information objects but their representation. We go to an electronic bookstore and look at images, reviews and summaries of books. A search engine gives us titles and brief sentences from the web pages, or snapshots of images. To have contact with the actual information objects is expensive and time consuming. Just 100 years ago we needed to wait months to go from one part of the world to another. There are Internet applications that can take us around the globe for a virtual visit in seconds. If we want to get specialized pictures of exotic life forms we can probably find them in a book or in a video. We interact with representations most of the time. Even words are representations.

Representation of information is related to its use, to its storage for later use, to its retrieval by command. It is not only in reference to certain obvious types of media such as print and electronics but also to other more abstract forms as in the discussions of concept representation, organizational learning and knowledge, or mental structures.

Void of a definition of information, to look at representation one must at least define a unit of information and examine how it is packaged. Examining information as packages may be useful. After all, we are familiar with books, documents, and other packages of information and not with information itself. Packages of information are concrete and information is an abstract construct or phenomenon.

Based on the idea that information answers some information need, and that it exists in some package of information, identifiers of these questions are categorized according to type of question. The set of issues related to this categorization is known as information organization; the materials that are organized are the information packages and the capsules of information at varying degrees of specificity in each package.

Example of questions answered by different information capsules that may exist in one or several packages of information: Who wrote Tom Sawyer? What books did Mark Twain write? Who is Samuel Langhorne Clemens. All of these questions are related but separate. Each represents something, a capsule of information. Each question is a representation in and of itself. The answers also represent the same thing in an illustration of how a capsule of information may have multiple representations, and that capsules may be part of multiple packages.

A short linguistic construction that combines all of these related pointers would address all questions, and may be considered a representation. This construction could take the form of a sentence such as Samuel Langhorne Clemens, also known as Mark Twain, wrote the novel Tom Sawyer. A larger paragraph would expand the idea, convey the same topic and include new not asked pieces of information. Likewise, there are multiple books on the life and work of Mark Twain, which would span the topic even more.