Information and the Presence of Poetry: Designing a Study of Poets' Information Practices

While there is increased interest in studying the information behavior of individuals engaged in creative pursuits, the body of research on the topic is still small in comparison to the volume of studies concerning the information behavior of scientists, social scientists, and humanists. Two possible and interrelated explanations for this are 1) non‐artists' misunderstanding artists' need for information as a support and inspiration for their work; and 2) the difficulty inherent in studying the creative process, which is highly personal to the artist and often not visible to others. This short paper describes a model for data collection designed to mitigate these challenges; by shifting the preliminary data collection to the artists themselves, diary studies mitigate the challenges presented by attempting to study artists' information behavior in the internal and non‐linear processes of creation. The author designed a study to capture 21 poets' impressions of the role of information in both inspiring and supporting their poetry writing. This paper describes the project design and execution, data collection, and next steps in the author's data analysis process.