Library and Information Science 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 …

Ul Annual Report 2018-2019, Stephanie Dawson Everett

Library Publications

This report highlights some of the ways the Libraries help students succeed, supports faculty research, and provides valuable cultural and educational opportunities for the UA community and the region.

On The Reactionary Treatment Of American Radicals By J. Edgar Hoover's Fbi, Sonia Potter

Student Projects from the Archives

African Americans, who had been systematically oppressed from the very beginning of their time in the United States, were calling more and more loudly for freedom and equality in the mid-twentieth century. Compounded with the fear and hatred of communism was also a fear of black Americans ascending to the same societal plane as white Americans, especially among individuals and groups of people who held racist views and had reservations about equality between blacks and whites.

One of the groups of people who seemed to have reservations about such a concept was the United States’ own Federal Bureau of Investigation …

Tuberculosis Patient Number 296 In The Daniel Harris Papers, Margaret Stehura, Cristopher Shell, Zachary Piette

Student Projects from the Archives

This essay examines Susan Sontag's _Illness as Metaphor_ alongside Daniel Harris's studies of those admitted for tuberculosis care at the Saranac Lake Sanitarium. While both Sontag’s perceptions and Patient 296’s tubercular reality may not be 100% aligned with one another (i.e., lived experience of someone with tuberculosis versus historical perceptions of the disease itself), by combining both aspects we are able to develop a fairly crystalline image of what it was like to actually have tuberculosis at this point in time. In doing so, it becomes clear that while some perceptions of tuberculosis may have been fairly misguided, it was …

“Failure Of Will”?: Tb Patient Narratives And Susan Sontag’S Illness As Metaphor, Bryon Dickon, Ashley Gonzalez

Student Projects from the Archives

Susan Sontag outlines in Illness as Metaphor the romantic narratives of what she called a “tubercular personality.” Sontag writes the following in doing so, describing one key aspect of romantic tuberculosis: “TB was understood, like insanity, to a kind of one-sidedness; a failure of will or an overintensity…the tubercular was considered to be someone quintessentially vulnerable, and full of self-destructive whims” (63-64). “A failure of will” and “quintessential vulnerability” form a set of characteristics through which a narrative of the “tubercular personality” is constructed. The tubercular narrative Sontag describes is based on a wide variety of stereotypes. This creates a …

“Ships, Vol. 2” Beyond Transport, Combat And Tourism: A Study Into Ships On Postcards, Janos Jalics

Student Projects from the Archives

Over several millennia, ships have been displayed in all sorts of media ranging from commercials to diaries and newspapers. When the postcard was invented in 1869, various ships began appearing on them. Postcards with ships became far more than a way to message. They became advertisements, showcases of paintings, and repositories of information. Postcards gave ships a new purpose and unique audiences in the name of advertisement, art, and knowledge, as this essay will show by examining “Ships, Vol. 2”of the David P. Campbell Postcard Collection at The University of Akron.

Replicating Nontraditional Postcards From The Archive, Cristopher Shell

Student Projects from the Archives

The purpose of this project is to digitize and replicate nontraditional postcards from the David P. Campbell Postcard Collection from Drs. Nicholas and Dorothy Cummings Center for the History of Psychology.I set out to find the easiest way to replicate a few postcards that are nontraditional in one way or another. The method I came to involves using a Cricut Printer and the Cricut Design Space to scan and upload the complex shapes. The result was that I could very easily replicate any of the three chosen postcards with little to no trouble. I concluded that, even though Cricut Printers …

Postcards And Psychograms: The Science Of Handwriting Analysis, Aubrey Baldwin

Student Projects from the Archives

One psychogram, or means of testing personality, is handwriting analysis or graphology. Handwriting analysis can be used to look at personality traits or it can be used to determine emotions that a person is feeling when they are writing things like a postcard or a letter. This essay will look at the history of handwriting analysis and then will analyze four postcards from the 1920’s using Paul D. Hugon's handwriting analysis test.

Thanks to the Drs. Nicholas and Dorothy Cumming Center for the History of Psychology, Hugon's Psychograms test has been saved and it will be used to do the …

“Here Is Where Al Capone And A Few Others Are Spending Their Vacations?” : Tracing How Alcatraz Was Portrayed In Postcards, 1924-1971, Franchesica Kidd

Student Projects from the Archives

Between the 1920s and the 1970s and as Alcatraz was decommissioned as a federal prison and bloomed into a booming tourist industry, the Rock saw a change in the way that the postcard industry portrayed it via photos on the back of postcards. As time went on, Alcatraz was depicted more as a tourist hotspot than a warning place to stay out of. Photo postcards of Alcatraz shifted from black and white photos and printed photos toward lively colored photos that had the message “Wish You Were Here!” printed on them, suggesting a cultural shift in attitude toward this notorious …

A Map Based On The "Hold-To-Light" Binder, Amanda Leach

Student Projects from the Archives

The Hold-to-Light cards in the David P. Campbell Postcard Collection have a wide dispersion over the United States and Europe, and even one from Argentina. The Copper Window cards, however, are predominately travel postcards, which show a popular tourist attraction. These cards are indeed clustered in the New England Area. This tells us that these coastal states were popular travel destinations in the early 1900s. To explore this interactive map, please follow the link below:

https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1Wkjl4QLAxLYX7ukvp84fgIcV4TsNTB0G&ll=35.41926243680842%2C-97.16311076875001&z=4

Capturing Hold-To-Light Postcard Images: A Video, Richard Marko

Student Projects from the Archives

One of the major challenges we faced in working with our binder from the David P Campbell Postcard Collection was getting digital images of the postcards with their Hold-to-Light effects. After a few attempts with the scanner it was decided that photography was the best way to capture these images. In order to best capture the Hold-to-Light a special card holder was constructed. The holder helped make photographing the cards less time consuming and produced the best quality images in showing the effects of the cards. The construction process and instructions for this card holder can be found in this …

Hold-To-Light And Other Specialty Postcards, Zoe Orcutt

Student Projects from the Archives

The "Hold-to-Light" binder in the David P. Campbell Postcard Collection deals primarily with cards that contain some type of visual effect when viewed. The majority of the cards’ visual effects can be viewed when held up a light. For this, they are usually called HTL (hold-to-light) cards, or transparency cards. There were three specific processes used in printing these HTL Cards: Die-cutting, Transparency, and Slide-Transparency.

M. Storey-Bates Cards, Stacy Young, Emma Grosjean

Student Projects from the Archives

The M. Storey-Bates postcard binder in the David P. Campbell Postcard Collection includes 132 postcards that date from 1904-1918 and that feature a multitude of images. These images consist of photographs of Edwardian actors and actresses, cartoon illustrations, illustrations created from Dickens, paintings, and much more. All of the postcards that are included in the binder have been mailed to addresses in the United Kingdom, most certainly from other addresses in the UK. The majority of these postcards were mailed to Minnie Storey-Bates (1887-1959) from Ralph Duckworth (1885-1960). Their personal relationship included correspondence that consisted of mundane daily activities, check-ins, …

A Map Based On The Institutions, Asylums, Etc. Binder, Justin Veda

Student Projects from the Archives

This project creates a map that displays the real life locations of the institutions pictured in our Institutions, Asylums, Etc. binder’s postcards and creates a website that displays the information of the map and some of the information from Veronica Bagley’s project.

The David P. Campbell Postcard Collection, searchable at postcard.uakron.edu, is a key collection of the CCHP’s Institute for Human Science and Culture. The collection provides the raw material for this project.

Overview To The Institutions, Asylums, Etc. Binder Catalogue, Veronica Bagley

Student Projects from the Archives

This project involves compiling different tables, graphs, and indexes that cover the Institutions, Asylums, Etc. binder. I also made a glossary that covers some of the names of the institutions for which definitions may not be obvious. The intention was that these can be added to the binder for future researchers.

The David P. Campbell Postcard Collection, searchable at postcard.uakron.edu, is a key collection of the CCHP’s Institute for Human Science and Culture.

“None But The Brave Deserve The Fair?” An Analysis Of Lovers Postcards From The First World War, Randall Slonaker

Student Projects from the Archives

Over ten percent of postcards in the Lovers Portraits Vol. 1 binder feature couples where the man is wearing a military uniform, with twenty-two of these cards depicting men in World War I era, United States military garb. The images and captions featured on these cards evoke familiar ideas of romance, courtship, and marital fidelity. Therefore, I have chosen to write a short synopsis that groups all of the World War One themed cards in this binder in one of three categories: courtship and pursuit, domesticity and marriage, and marital commitment and fidelity. I have positioned the images and captions …

“Feminists Leap Year Vol. 2:” The Portrayals Of Gender In Early 20th Century Postcards, Anthony Pankuch, Jessica Wilson

Student Projects from the Archives

The “Feminists Leap Year Vol. 2” binder of the David P. Campbell Postcard Collection contains postcards reflecting women in empowered, vulnerable, pitiful, and satirical situations. They appear in scenes of public activism, romance, and the once-mythologized American frontier. The postcards arranged by Dr. Campbell under the banner of “Feminist” reflect the stereotypes, themes, and gendered images that have remained attached to the feminist movement from its emergence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to its incarnation in the twenty-first century. Postcard images demonstrate the intersectionality of gender and feminism by juxtaposing postcards satirizing women as masculine or domestically …

The Medium And The Message In Early Twentieth Century Postcards Picturing Courtship And Romance, Rosemary Herbert

Student Projects from the Archives

This examination of representative postcards from the Lovers Portrait Vol. 1 volume in the David P. Campbell Postcard Collection will use the postcards dating from the early twentieth century and the messages on them to illuminate facts about postcard production, postal history, family relationships, daily life, fashion strictures, and much more. With each card inspiring a piece of detective work that brings to light a nugget of information about a time gone by, this work also generally represents the kind of curiosities that the collection as a whole brings to light. It is hoped that it will serve as a …