Digital Commons Network^™

Making-To-Be: Documents, Facta, And Material-Discursive Agency, Elliott Hauser

Proceedings from the Document Academy

This paper presents the performative analysis of agency within and surrounding documents as a path towards uniting the otherwise incompatible insights of both meaningcentric and materialcentric approaches. I contrast the terms agentical, providing agency, and agentic, possessing agency, to help clarify the apparent incompatibilities of prior approaches. I argue that a relational conception of agency, wherein the agentical/agentic distinction is blurred, preserves important virtues of both meaning and materialcentric approaches to documents. This paves the way for a unified materialdiscursive account of documents and a cure for document studies’ inherited duality malady. Extending prior work on capta (Drucker, 2011) and …

Seeing Indonesian Ghost Films Through Document Theory, — Suprayitno, Dian Novita Fitriani, Rusdan Kamil, — Rahmi

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Hantu, or ghosts, are portrayed as the incarnation of monstrous or evil souls wishing to harm humans. Most modern Indonesians still believe in ghosts, as suggested by a growing number of ghost films in recent years. From the 1970s until the present, more than 320 ghost films have been made and can be differentiated according to each culture, custom, and religion in Indonesia. Indonesian people believe that ghost films in Indonesia are scarier than ghost films from abroad because of a symbolic bond between ghosts and traditional myths represented in the films. This paper aims to understand ghost films …

Overalls - Complex Document(S): A Never-Ending Artistic Research Process, Niels W. Lund

Proceedings from the Document Academy

I want to show that a pair of overalls can be a document in many senses, and thus demonstrate that the complementary relationship between materiality, sociality and conceptuality is a very complex relationship.

I will use an artistic approach to show the complex relationship and make an exposition of verbal text and images, consisting of 4 parts:

1. Origin of overalls

A short history of overalls - denim pants first with suspenders and later with bibs. They go back to the 18th century, were mass-produced by Levi Strauss and Lee and became popular work garment and later for leisure and …

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 …

Representativity And Complementarity In Tai Chi As Embodied Documentation, Joacim Hansson

Proceedings from the Document Academy

The aim of this paper is to investigate what happens if we leave the criteria of materiality and permanence behind in the study of documents. How far can we stretch the definition of a document or define a documentation process in a situation where neither the originary fact, or object, nor that by which this is represented is material or permanent? Empirically, the paper is constructed as a case study of the traditional Chinese practice of Tai Chi and presents a formulation of the Tai Chi form as an immaterial document and Tai Chi pratice as a doumentation process. The …

A Discussion On Document Conceptualization, Niels W. Lund, Tim Gorichanaz, Kiersten F. Latham

Proceedings from the Document Academy

The authors discuss two conceptual frameworks of documents and documentation: Lund's complementarity theory of documentation; and Gorichanaz and Latham's framework of document phenomenology. The role of documentation in conceptualizing the document is discussed, and the notions of documentation and documental becoming are compared. Through the discussion, clarity is gained regarding both methods of conceptualization.

Shannon Goes To The Museum: Drawing Lines Across Boundaries, Kiersten F. Latham, Jodi Kearns

Proceedings from the Document Academy

The DOCAM’15 theme called for an examination of the challenges ahead with our understanding of documents in a continuously changing information landscape. One such challenge has been to find specific intersecting areas of the information sciences on which authors from different disciplines might collaborate. We take ourselves as one such case study. One of us works in information science and often thinks about applications of Information Theory. One of us works on developing models for museum practice, that is, theory upon which museum work might become more intentional and robust. Thinking about Documents Unbounded has led us to align some …