Description:
This paper presents an empirically based model of how people make sense of information they find when searching online. Fifteen graduate students enrolled in a course on Webpage Design were asked to search for information on "electronic literacy," thinking aloud as they did. Subjects' think aloud protocols and their stimulated recollections about these activities were captured on videotape. The videotapes were transcribed, analyzed and coded. The working model of how these subjects made sense of the information they found online is presented and researchers' preliminary observations concerning subjects' sense-making activities are discussed. Of particular interest in this regard is the pervasiveness of subjects' use of scanning, "circling," and bricolage, and the seeming absence of the "linking by association" predicted by media scholars.