Digital Commons Network^™

A Research Program For Studying Lams And Community In The Digital Age, Andreas Vårheim, Roswitha Skare, Noah Lenstra, Kiersten F. Latham, Geir Grenersen

Proceedings from the Document Academy

The paper outlines a research effort into the changing representations, policies, strategies, activities, and practices of libraries, archives, and museums (LAMs) in the digital age. Comprehensive social changes including big slow-moving processes, such as aging populations, global migration, technological change, and environmental change, expose communities and LAM institutions to vulnerabilities. How do the institutions handle vulnerabilities, how do they become more resilient, and how do they contribute to building the resilience of their local communities?

The Public Library And Social Media: A Case Study From Tromsø, Norway, Roswitha Skare

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Historically, archives, libraries and museums (ALM) have been perceived as institutions providing infrastructure for an open and enlightened public discourse. The Norwegian Public Libraries Act focuses on public libraries being providers of knowledge and cultural expressions, agents of popular enlightenment, local meeting places and arenas of debate and participation in the public sphere. But public libraries are also supposed to keep up with the technological development and to offer digital services to the inhabitants of their municipality. This paper presents the first findings of an ongoing research project investigating the relationship between physical meetings at the Tromsø public library and …

The Wonders Of The Augsburg Cabinet: Three Ways Of Experiencing A Document, Kiersten F. Latham

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Since even before Frohmann (2009) proposed his document analysis on the meaning of cabinets of curiosity, I have been fascinated with them. Their emergence in the 15th century (MacGregor, 2007) is also the tantalizing beginnings of the birth of the modern museum. In museum studies, we often ask what the meaning of the museum is today (Latham & Simmons, 2014); I believe that part of the answer to this question is in these curious compartmentalized pieces of furniture that held the wonders of the world and helped users make meaning a very long time ago.

One can see examples of …

Image And Range-Based 3d Acquisition And Modeling Of Popular Musical Instruments, Giacomo Patrucco, Filiberto Chiabrando, Piercarlo Dondi, Marco Malagodi

Proceedings from the Document Academy

This article aims to illustrate the importance of the contribution of 3D survey and modeling techniques in the framework of movable heritage and museum collection documentation and cataloguing. The work reported in this study focuses on digitalization and 3D modeling of some popular music instruments (belonging to the collection of Museo del Paesaggio Sonoro in Italy) in the framework of the SAMIC project (Sound Archives & Musical Instruments Collection). Different sensors and strategies have been applied during this research in order to obtain high-resolution digital replicas of the objects (a LiDAR system and a photogrammetric approach have been …

Disciplines Derived From The Discovery Of Historical Archives, Yongsheng Chen, Huanning Su

Proceedings from the Document Academy

This paper reviews four famous areas of study in China that emerged from the discovery of historical archives to become their own disciplines. Through a literature review, this paper analyzes the importance of historical archives for forming disciplines by introducing the origin, development, research objectives and research contents of these four disciplines. Based on that, this paper finally suggests that people’s attention to archives is the biggest reason for forming disciplines. By discussing the reasons for accelerating the combination of studies and historical archives, this paper gives suggestions for archives management.

Libraries And The Establishment Of A Sámi Political Sphere, Geir Grenersen

Proceedings from the Document Academy

The first Sámi newspaper, Sagai Muitalæggje, was established in 1903, and in 1906 the first Sámi was elected to the Norwegian parliament. Through these two events, the Sámi (the indigenous population of Norway) had their own voice heard and achieved political influence in the public sphere for the first time. What was the role and significance of libraries in this process? Anders Larsen, the editor of Sagai Muitalæggje, and his friend Isak Persen, the first Sámi elected to the Norwegian Parliament, were students at Tromsø Teaching College, the highest academic institution in Northern Norway at that time. Anders Larsen …

The Architext Of Biblion: Digital Echoes Of Paul Otlet, Arthur Perret

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Paul Otlet's 1934 Traité de documentation is a landmark publication, but its considerable scope, complex structure and sheer volume make it a particularly challenging resource to use. This paper reports on an experiment in which visual methods and lexicometry are used to understand how the Traité is organized and what it is about. We describe the underlying logic of the experiment using the concepts of biblion and architext, then process the table of contents and full text of the book with several visualization methods, discussing their output. This allows us to confirm and expand on previous qualitative appraisal of the …

Documents And Moral Knowledge: Art In Yellowstone National Park, Tim Gorichanaz

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Documents have traditionally been conceptualized as representations of reality. Recently, scholars have been exploring how documents can also construct reality. In this paper, I follow this thread, discussing how documents can supply moral knowledge, showing what people ought to value in the world, thereby guiding action. Specifically, I discuss two works of art depicting Yellowstone National Park: a painting by Thomas Moran, done in the 19th century; and a photograph by Michael Nichols, from the 21st. Both of these works respond to a dualism in the human relationship to the wilderness, dating back at least to the European colonization of …

The Documentality Of Memory In The Post-Truth Era, Claire Scopsi

Proceedings from the Document Academy

This article analyzes the documentality of memories in order to ground further consideration of memory for historical research in the post-truth era. The article compares discussions of the document in document theory to those in French historical epistemology in order to establish what is a reliable documentary source. Formerly, reliability was rooted in the paradigm of truth and the authenticity guaranteed by institutions and scientists. In today's post-truth era, these foundations are questioned. This article suggests that we consider the production of historical narratives as a design process, and that we evaluate the truthfulness of a source according to three …

Auto-Documentality As Rights And Powers, Ronald E. Day

Proceedings from the Document Academy

This paper discusses beings and their rights in terms of philosophical and documentation ontology. It discusses animal rights, rights of nature, and human rights. It discusses the role of representation in documents, documentation theory, and documentality. It discusses the difference between documentation and documentality,

From Bibliography To Documentography, Michael K. Buckland

Proceedings from the Document Academy

There is ambiguity in the use of the term bibliography for both the study of printed books and also for the listing of accessible intellectual resources. We address this ambiguity by examining two well-known anomalies: Donald F. Mckenzie’s assertion that bibliography should extend to all media, including culturally significant objects in the landscape and Suzanne Briet’s declaration that an antelope in a zoo is a document. This paper summarizes and extends an earlier, more detailed discussion (Buckland, 2018).

Why Are We Here? On The (Philosophical) Value Of Documents, Marco Inchingolo, Valeria Martino

Proceedings from the Document Academy

What does a philosopher do with documents? The most natural answer to this question would probably be that philosophers, as writers, produce documents. What would appear as less intuitive, though, is a philosopher producing documents about documents. But philosophy—and in particular ontology—has always been interested in what there is out there in the world. And documents are a peculiar class of objects, the stuff the world is filled with. This year, the Annual Meeting of the Document Academy has been hosted by a philosophy department for the first time: by the Department of Philosophy of the University of Turin. …

Accidental Archives Of Performance Making, Sarah Whatley

Proceedings from the Document Academy

This paper introduces the online toolkit created during the AHRC-funded Resilience and Inclusion: Dancers as Agents of Change project. Although the primary aim of the toolkit is the transmission of information for training purposes, the toolkit has simultaneously created a carefully curated repository of performance documents and related materials with a film at the core out of which many of the learning materials emerge. The discussion considers how this curated library of valuable performance documents creates an "accidental archive." Notwithstanding the challenges of making materials "open," often connected to institutional gatekeeping, this short paper poses questions about the documenting of …

Reflective Documentation As A Movement Potential: Two Digital Platforms Building A Professional Learning Community, John Taylor, Defne Erdur

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Creating dance and training dancers is a collaborative and co-creative process, and teaching has a central role in the co-creative artistic processes. Yet dance teachers, whether free-lance or working in an institution, often develop and maintain their physical teaching practice in isolation. Additionally, because of the ephemeral nature of dance and the relational nature of dance education, these practices usually do not end up being recorded or documented as a body of knowledge. In the face of such a reality the online database IDOCDE.net provides a platform for the development and maintenance of an inclusive professional learning community through a …

Ballet’S New Stage: Social Documentation Of Dance, Adelaide F. Robinson

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Ballet is an art form that is both archaic and innovative, elitist and accessible, and it has built up a community around itself that is constantly making their feelings on these subjects heard. This paper discusses some trends in the social documentation of ballet. It describes the historical context of dance documentation, considers the distinction between collecting and documenting, and speculates on the future of dance documentation.

The Life Of A Dance: Double Take Part Ii, Gregory C. Sporton

Proceedings from the Document Academy

The documentation of dance regularly asserts a false concept. This is that dances can be fixed, like a text, script, painting or even a musical score. Dance academics and organizations like ballet companies and the trusts that claim to protect and preserve the heritage of specific choreographers protect this idea. Focused far more on outputs than production, they decontextualize dance by ignoring its context: the working process. Notwithstanding the problematics of this assumption about the archival form of such material, that the tokens of the types that Wollheim (1968) posits as necessary are simply too flexible to be captured as …

Virtually Sensuous (Geographies): Towards A Strategy For Archiving Multi-User Experiential And Participatory Installations, Sarah F J Rubidge

Proceedings from the Document Academy

This paper explores potential strategies for the audio-visual documentation of a multi-user choreographic digital installation entitled Sensuous Geographies using VR technologies. The installation was interactive, fully immersive and participatory, with the general public initiating the details of the installation’s sonic and visual worlds. At the time of the making of Sensuous Geographies, the means of documenting participatory installations in action was limited to video documentation and photographs, which represent a third-person perspective. This article suggests that new forms of technology provide an opportunity to archive interactive choreographic installations in such a way that the choreographic forms and embodied experience they …

Should Theatre Disappear Like Soap Bubbles?, Erin Lee

Proceedings from the Document Academy

I recently read an excerpt from a 2004 interview with Peter Hall where he claims that he was happy for his materials to disappear "like soap bubbles" (Reason, 2006). One of the fundamentally difficult things about archiving theatre, aside from its ephemeral nature, is the approach that creatives take to their work. Not only do we need to battle the format of live performance but we also need to convince many creatives, not all I must add, that their work can and should remain in the Archive for use in the future. There are glimmers of potential in the area …

Performing The Quality Of Imperceptible Interactions Between Individuals: A Technological Challenge Regarding The Collective, Marine Theunissen

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Contemporary technologies allow incredible possibilities of capturing individuals, but a problem arises when it comes to capturing a chorus, that is to say a "collective body" in motion. This proposal will address the problem of the sensitive capture of the quality of the interrelations between individuals, and of their refined interpretation through algorithms to "output” them in other forms. We will address two questions on the subject: how to capture the relations between individuals within a collective? How to create a circular-causal loop, whose artistic material (the digital data) is the interrelations of a collective, without engendering redundancy in their …

The Walking Dramaturg: An Autoethnographic Methodology For Performance Documentation, Giselle G. Garcia

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Technology usually implies the distancing of the human experience, but I argue what technology has enabled can teach us something about the role of multiplicity and the rhizomatic nature of history and storytelling. By looking at the subject position of the practicing performance researcher in terms of the walking dramaturg, the autoethnographic catalogue of such experience becomes a form of documentation in the archive of theatre histories. Taking the time to explore a nuanced understanding of the documeter’s subject position acknowledges the multifarious subject positions that contribute to the archive of theatre histories.

Beyond creating a record of evidence, I …

Filming The Stage: Reflections On The Historical And The Aesthetic Perspectives Of An Essential Archive Of The Future, André Deridder

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Since the appearance and growth of cinema, a close but sometimes ambiguous relationship has been forged between the “Seventh Art” and the performing arts. Although cinema evolved quickly to become an art form in its own right, the stage and the productions produced for this space remain an object of attention for film directors. The relationship between the audio-visual sector and the presentational arts torments historians, creators and aestheticians alike. Experimented with and made use of by some, with varying degrees of success, fully rejected by others, the filming of the stage always raises many practical questions as well as …

A Documentary-Material Approach For Performance, Marc Kosciejew

Proceedings from the Document Academy

This article begins a conceptual discussion about the relationship between documentation, performance, and materiality. It argues that a documentary approach helps show the roles played by documents and practices with them in performance’s materialization and constitution. It presents the start of a documentary approach for analyzing performance by discussing some ways in which documentation helps provide a material basis for performance beyond its enactment whilst simultaneously materializing and constituting it in and for other diverse contexts.

Documenting Performance And Contemporary Data Models: Positioning Performance Within Frbr And Lrm, Deborah Lee

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Documents relating to the performing arts have proven a complex and somewhat unresolved part of the data models which fuel modern bibliographic cataloguing standards. The model of bibliographic data known as FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records), which is now superseded by LRM (IFLA Library Reference Model), underpin cataloguing standards, yet do not easily deal with materials relating to performance. The article introduces FRBR and LRM, and highlights existing literature which explores these models as related to performance documentation. An exposition of an important paper by Miller and Le Boeuf from 2005 is given, and their model forms the basis …

Is The World After All Just A Dream?, Lyn Robinson, Joseph Dunne

Proceedings from the Document Academy

DocPerform is a multi and interdisciplinary research project based at City, University of London. Led by members of the Department of Library & Information Science, it comprises scholars and practitioners from the fields of performing arts and library & information science. The project concerns conceptual, methodological and technological innovations in the documentation of performance, and the extent to which performance may itself be considered to be a document. The collection of papers in this special issue of Proceedings from the Document Academy are selected from the second DocPerform Symposium, held at City, University of London, 6–7 November 2017. This …