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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

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Arts and Humanities

The University of Akron

Document theory

Publication Year

Articles 1 - 3 of 3

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Making-To-Be: Documents, Facta, And Material-Discursive Agency, Elliott Hauser Jan 2024

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 …


The Documentality Of Memory In The Post-Truth Era, Claire Scopsi Dec 2018

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 Dec 2017

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 …