A Semiotic Interpretation of Sense-making in Information Seeking

Sense-making in information seeking process is one of the major information seeking models. Questions have been raised about information seekers’ ambiguous needs and focus-shifting tendency relative to sense-making. This paper tackles this problem by reviewing two related approaches and suggesting an alternative interpretation from the semiotic point of view. The author argues that information seeking is often interactive, dynamic, and infinite just as the relationships between sign, object and interpretant posited in Peirce’s semiotics. The implication of this paper is to alert information seekers about this potential endless information seeking process and come to terms with their search results which are based on their tasks.