Exploring the Domain of Information “Users”: Semantic Analysis of Wikipedia Articles

• Main Author: Soohyung Joo
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: National Taiwan University 2020-06-01
• Series: Journal of Library and Information Studies
• Subjects: information users; domain analysis; textual analysis; wikipedia; user studies
• Online Access: https://jlis.lis.ntu.edu.tw/files/journal/j50-1.pdf

This study aims to explore the domain of information users based on the textual analysis of Wikipedia. The study collected 132 Wikipedia articles related to information users. Then, multiple existing methods of textual analysis were applied to explore prevalent concepts and topics in relation to information users. The text analysis methods applied in this study include: Term frequency analysis, the Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic models, hierarchical clustering, dimensional reduction, and term co-occurrence analysis. The findings reveal that Wikipedia covers various topics of the domain of information users. The domain of information users involves four fundamental concepts, including “users,” “behaviors,” “systems/technology,” and “information objects.” In addition, the study identifies different areas of the domain, ranging from information search behavior, information retrieval, human-computer interaction, user experience, human factors, and to others.