A CROSS-DISCIPLINARY INQUIRY INTO PATTERNS OF THINKING AND INFORMATION STRUCTURING

This dissertation research is a multidisciplinary inquiry into topicality, involving an in-depth examination of literatures and empirical data and an inductive development of a faceted typology (containing 227 fine-grained topical relevance relationships and 33 types of presentation relationship). This inquiry investigates a large variety of topical connections beyond topic matching, renders a closer look into the structure of a topic, achieves an enriched understanding of topicality and relevance, and induces a cohesive topic-oriented information architecture that is meaningful across topics and domains. The findings from the analysis contribute to the foundation work of information organization, intellectual access / information retrieval, and knowledge discovery. Using qualitative content analysis, the inquiry focuses on meaning and deep structure: Phase 1: develop a unified theory-grounded typology of topical relevance relationships through close reading of literature and synthesis of thinking from communication, rhetoric, cognitive psychology, education, information science