The Shannon-Weaver model of linear information transmission is extended withtwo loops potentially generating redundancies: (i) meaning is provided locallyto the information from the perspective of hindsight, and (ii) meanings can becodified differently and then refer to other horizons of meaning. Thus, threelayers are distinguished: variations in the communications, historicalorganization at each moment of time, and evolutionary self-organization of thecodes of communication over time. Furthermore, the codes of communication canfunctionally be different and then the system is both horizontally andvertically differentiated. All these subdynamics operate in parallel andnecessarily generate uncertainty. However, meaningful information can beconsidered as the specific selection of a signal from the noise; the codes ofcommunication are social constructs that can generate redundancy by givingdifferent meanings to the same information. Reflexively, one can translateamong codes in more elaborate discourses. The second (instantiating) layer canbe operationalized in terms of semantic maps using the vector space model; thethird in terms of mutual redundancy among the latent dimensions of the vectorspace. Using Blaise Cronin's {\oe}uvre, the different operations of the threelayers are demonstrated empirically.
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