Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Paul Otlet And The Ultimate Prospect Of Documentation, Olivier Le Deuff, Arthur Perret

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Paul Otlet (1868-1944) has left information science a vast written legacy. He imagined future developments of documentation around new devices. His anticipations have attracted some misunderstandings and criticism. Otlet’s more daring projections were considered utopian but they are best studied in the historical context of his time. We present the relationship between the concepts of documentation and hyperdocumentation, the ultimate prospect of documentation, and the proximity between Otlet’s work and current conceptions of transhumanism in view of his Mundaneum project.

Paratext – A Useful Concept For The Analysis Of Digital Documents?, Roswitha Skare

Proceedings from the Document Academy

In his study, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation , the French literature scholar Gérard Genette introduces the concept of the “paratext” to the public. Genette explains the term paratext as that “what enables a text to become a book and to be offered as such to its readers and, more generally, to the public” (Genette 1997, 1).

Genette’s concept has since also been applied to other media, especially audiovisual forms, such as film and television. Film scholars are using the concept when analyzing the importance of opening scenes and credits in films , or the significance of different technologies in providing …

Programs And Strategies For Community Resilience In A Metropolitan Area Public Library: A Case Study, Andreas Vårheim

Proceedings from the Document Academy

This paper reports a case study on community-oriented public library programs in a metropolitan Texan city. A main purpose of the paper is to report the findings from this explorative case study on the relationship of a public library system with its communities from a community resilience perspective. The study is a part of a research project aiming at creating empirically-based knowledge on the role of public libraries in forming community resilience. The description of specific library programs is a basis for further study of the mechanisms contributing to community resilience. Community resilience enables communities to face major environmental change …

Writing Documentarity, Arthur Perret

Proceedings from the Document Academy

European pioneers of documentation have inspired us to adopt a functional approach to documents. This has led to works on documentality, which is related to the agency and use of documents, and now on documentarity. We define documentarity as a “quantifiable quality”: not what is a document, but how something can seem documentary. This requires input from writing theories and the study of markup (architext, scripturation) and a comparison between interfaces and the underlying processes (documentarisation, editorialisation).

Documentary Provenance And Digitized Collections: Concepts And Problems, Mats Dahlström, Joacim Hansson

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Provenance research in digitized memory institution collections is mainly devoted to documenting and mapping the trajectories of the physical source documents across time, place and contexts, primarily by developing metadata standards and data models. The provenance of the digital reproduction and its relation to one or several physical source documents is however not being subjected to much inquiry. A possible explanation for this is the face-value approach with which we tend to regard digital reproductions. Looking more closely at such reproductions and their complex digitization process suggests a far from straightforward and linear provenance relation, and begs the question of …

Scholarly Communication And Documentary Fragmentations In The Public Space: A Functional Citation Study, Fidelia Ibekwe, Lucie Loubère

Proceedings from the Document Academy

This paper studies how academic content published in Open Edition.org, an online publication platform in the Social Sciences and Humanities is re-appropriated by members of the public. Our research is therefore concerned with the public appropriation of science and Open science. After extracting the contexts of citation of these content and mapping them, we propose a typology of citation functions as well as of citers (their origins and types). Our preliminary results indicated that academic literature is repurposed and cited by members of the public mainly as scientific warrant (support for their argumentation). We also found that academic content is …

Foregrounding Documentation Within Metaliteracy, Marc Kosciejew

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Documentation plays a central role in metaliteracy. When individuals engage in metaliterate practices of creating, sharing, and assessing information, they are, in fact, engaging in practices with documents. Yet, while the goals and objectives of metaliteracy implicitly acknowledge documentation, they do not explicitly emphasize the fundamental roles played by it in helping facilitate and enable various metaliterate practices. This article aims to make these roles explicit.

By foregrounding documentation – specifically documents and their associated practices – within metaliteracy, this article argues for the recognition of the fundamental roles played by documents and their associated practices within metaliterate practices and …

When Might Human Indexing Be Strongly Justified, Julian Warner

Proceedings from the Document Academy

The paper is concerned with the justification for human indexing, in the modern era. We understand human indexing in a classic sense, of human description of information objects in accord with a controlled vocabulary.

A justification for human indexing would be, when it yields a value commensurate with its cost. A long historically established value for retrieval systems is selection power, or an enhanced capacity for informed choice for the searcher.

The question of the justification for human indexing is made analytically tractable by reversing the historical order of development. We ask, what forms of selection power are not readily …

Metaphors For Meaningful Documents, Martin I. Nord

Proceedings from the Document Academy

The ever-increasing speed and reach of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are often lauded for the beneficial social effects we are told they have. This raises questions about the connection between knowledge and social relationships, especially concerning meaningful relationships in a world where people are increasingly represented as data. To answer this question, one approach is to consider the role of documents in communicating “meaningful” content in pursuit of understanding. Because this is difficult to articulate, this paper takes the approach of using metaphors—specifically of the document as a bridge, a window, a painting, a briefcase, and a mirror—to consider …

Information Design: Textualization, Documentarization, Auctorialization, Manuel Zacklad

Proceedings from the Document Academy

In this article on information design, we will begin by recalling our definition of information anchored in an anthropological vision of communication, and we will then present Buckland’s ternary approach to information, which is in tune with our typology. Secondly, we will return to the notion of device (dispositif) to introduce information and communication devices, of which we will give a few examples. This will allow us, in the third section, to present the design of recorded information in all its richness and complexity, combining the issues of textualization, authorialization, and documentarization.

The Ontology Of Documents, Revisited, Jonathan Furner

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Three contributions are made to understanding the nature of documents. A survey of definitions of "document" from the last century shows that those definitions which most accurately reflect the ways in which the term "document" is used in practice are typically compound definitions, consisting of two or three elements that each refer to a different function of documents: medium, message, and meaning. Locating documents in E. J. Lowe's four-category ontology results in consideration of documents as universals rather than as particulars. Analysis of B. Smith's theory of document acts suggest that all documents, not just the ones that are involved …