Shannon–Weaver model

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The Shannon–Weaver model as portrayed in a report from the United States Office of Technology Assessment
The Shannon–Weaver model as portrayed in a report from the United States Office of Technology Assessment

The Shannon–Weaver model of communication has been called the "mother of all models."[1] It embodies the concepts of information source, message, transmitter, signal, channel, noise, receiver, information destination, probability of error, coding, decoding, information rate, channel capacity, etc.

In 1948 Claude Elwood Shannon published A Mathematical Theory of Communication article in two parts in the July and October numbers of the Bell System Technical Journal.[2] In this fundamental work he used tools in probability theory, developed by Norbert Wiener, which were in their nascent stages of being applied to communication theory at that time. Shannon developed information entropy as a measure for the uncertainty in a message while essentially inventing what became known as the dominant form of "information theory."

The book co-authored with Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication, reprints Shannon's 1948 article and Weaver's popularization of it, which is accessible to the non-specialist.[3] Shannon's concepts were also popularized, subject to his own proofreading, in John Robinson Pierce's Symbols, Signals, and Noise.[4]

The term Shannon–Weaver model was widely adopted into the social science fields, such as education, organizational analysis, psychology, etc. In engineering and mathematics fields, Shannon's theory is used more literally, and referred to by his name alone, as Shannon theory, or as information theory,[5] since the popularized model of Weaver is not needed to utilize Shannon's mathematical results.

[edit] References

  1. ^ David D. Woods and Erik Hollnagel (2005). Joint Cognitive Systems: Foundations of Cognitive Systems Engineering. ISBN 0849328217. 
  2. ^ Claude Shannon (1948). "A Mathematical Theory of Communication". Bell System Technical Journal 27 (July and October): pp. 379–423, 623–656. 
  3. ^ Warren Weaver and Claude Elwood Shannon (1963). The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Univ. of Illinois Press. ISBN 0252725484. 
  4. ^ John Robinson Pierce (1980). An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals & Noise. Courier Dover Publications. ISBN 0486240614. 
  5. ^ Sergio Verdü (2000). "Fifty years of Shannon theory", in Sergio Verdü and Steven W. McLaughlin: Information theory: 50 years of discovery. IEEE Press, 13–34. ISBN 0-7803-5363-3. 


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