Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

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 …

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 …

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.

Rethinking The Potential Of Documentation Of Culture As A Data Gathering Practice, Tomasz Umerle

Proceedings from the Document Academy

In this article, I examine the documentation of culture (DoC). This is the practice of gathering and producing the information and data relevant to intangible cultural phenomena. DoC is generally practiced by teams of documentalists generally outside GLAM institutions (i.e., galleries, libraries, archives and museums). As such, it differs from the preservation and description of concrete objects of cultural heritage done within those institutions. I examine how DoC finds it increasingly difficult to clearly define and communicate its role: a) in relation to LIS; b) to the broader academic community; and c) in digital age of information overload. In this …

On The Borders Of The Document: Trip To Turakia, Sabine Roux, Caroline Courbieres

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Analysis of documentary boundaries through the study of a set of documents related to the French Theater Company Turak. We describe as artistic documents the different documents that circulate during the creation of a play. There is an initial documentary collection comprised of the documentation for the performance on which the company relies to stage the play itself. At different stages of artistic creation, the company designs documents that are useful for the pursuit of creative reflection. The theater company also develops documents aimed at promoting the play for professionals and the public. Finally, the spectators also produce many documents …

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 …

[For The System, Alternate Title: If It Sort Of Looks Like A Duck: Reflecting On Bad Photographs And Chains Of Custody], Jodi Kearns, Brian C. O'Connor

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Though the system will not permit it, our abstract is an out-of-focus photograph of ducks at 1900 pixels wide and black and white, which is approximately 20% the size of the original color photograph we use for our title. By most technical standards, it is a bad picture. Straightening the horizon, cropping the image to emphasize the two foremost ducks, brightening the image to highlight the feet, and adding a caption that indicates activity might yield a “better” picture for some viewers. This piece captures nearly 20 years of conversations about good and bad pictures, and continues the conversation from …

Science Serving Industry: Documentary Authority And Industrial Influence In 19th Century American Chemistry, Shawn Martin

Proceedings from the Document Academy

No abstract provided.

Telos Haunts Billboards, Colin Post

Proceedings from the Document Academy

This piece is an excerpt from an ongoing hypertext poem, akhilleus, which chronicles the activities of a network of characters interacting with the built world via text. This particular piece follows Telos, a seer of ends, as they appear before a billboard. Telos contemplates billboards as a kind of document, a succession of information planes along the roadway, echoing into and past each other, and also shares a premonition of the end of billboards.

Editorial, Tim Gorichanaz

Proceedings from the Document Academy

In response to the changing landscape of academic publishing, this special issue called for poetic engagements with questions of scholarly interest. In putting together this issue, we sought to showcase without evisceration the complex roles that documents play in human life.

“Windows” Of Time, Part Ii: Documenting Temporal And Embodied Epistemology In Musicians, Lynnsey K. Weissenberger

Proceedings from the Document Academy

As an extension to the earlier paper “Windows” of Time: Memory, Metaphor, and Storytelling as Documents, this paper examines how those documents both inform and are informed by temporal epistemology and embodied knowledge. They serve to document both temporal and embodied epistemology in the ongoing process of musical knowledge building, in music performance, as well as in teaching and transmission contexts. To illustrate in greater depth how these documents are situated between temporal and embodied knowledge, Irish traditional music examples are drawn from five renowned musicians as a kind of case study. A model representing the documents’ situation and …

Gauguin's Savage Document Work: Understanding As Function, Tim Gorichanaz

Proceedings from the Document Academy

We tend to think of documents as things that provide answers, but documents can also provoke questions. This can be seen clearly in the study of art-making as document work, since the power of art is not in how it can represent reality, but how it can pose questions to reality. In this paper, I examine the work of 19th-century artist Paul Gauguin, which proceeded through iterative abstraction and productive reproduction. Gauguin's document work was a mode of questioning with the epistemic and communicative aim of understanding.

The Curious Case Of Floating Fixity (And Its Relationship To Authenticity), Kiersten F. Latham

Proceedings from the Document Academy

This paper is part reflection and part analysis. I use a personal document experience to illustrate the use of the holistic analysis framework of Document Phenomenology (Gorichanaz & Latham, 2016) to explore the notion of floating fixity and its relationship to authenticity.

“Windows” Of Time: Memory, Metaphor, And Storytelling As Documents, Lynnsey K. Weissenberger

Proceedings from the Document Academy

This paper describes how alternative documents – memory, metaphor, and storytelling – negotiate musicians’ ongoing process of knowledge building. Examples are drawn from five music practitioners of different traditions around the world. In the contexts of teaching and learning, these documents provide evidence of changing epistemic perspectives in these music practitioners, and can be used to examine the complex relationships between time, knowledge building, and experience. Recent work in oral information and oral documents by Turner (2007; 2010), in addition to conceptual views of documents and documentation as early as Otlet (1934) and Briet (1951) and revisited by Buckland (1991; …

The Document: A Multiple Concept, Sabine Roux

Proceedings from the Document Academy

This paper discusses the concept of the document evolved throughout the 20th century in France, particularly through the writings of Robert Escarpit and Jean Meyriat. The document began as a simple notion and then gradually took on new meanings such that it is now seen as a construction of social values. Multiplicity is posited as a fundamental characteristic of the document, which affects its meaning, its interpretation and its social values. Like a rhizome, the document circulates in social spaces with multiple, nomadic associations through attribution, intention, meaning, interpretations and social values (political issues, artistic and aesthetic dimensions, economy, etc.) …

What Makes A Movie, Richard L. Anderson, Brian C. O'Connor

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Perhaps when the conditions of film projection will change, through technical progresses which promise to allow us to have access at will to films, it may be possible to walk leisurely, to wander, to loaf about, stroll and loiter …delighted to explore the ordered depth of a film, to appreciate a thousand details in a sequence while experiencing the unique character of the whole.

This quote from Baudry looked forward from the conclusion of our early piece “Access to Moving Image Documents,” published before the availability of digital computational tools. The digital environment has provided the stage for Baudry’s vision, …

How It All Started: 1996, The First Year Of Dokvit, Niels W. Lund

Proceedings from the Document Academy

This article describes in detail the first year of the Documentation Studies (Dokvit) program in Tromsø (1996) in attempt to offer an understanding of how Dokvit was part of the neo-documentation movement that began in the mid-90s with the rediscovery of Suzanne Briet and discussions on "What is a 'document'?" This article discusses how the Dokvit program was structured, including its curriculum, syllabus and teaching principles. In particular, it details the undergraduate student projects done this year and demonstrates how they were embedded within the historical and media situation of 1996. In conclusion, this article discusses how the experience of …

Tromsø And Documentation Studies: 20 Years Young (Editorial), Roswitha Skare, Kiersten F. Latham

Proceedings from the Document Academy

No abstract provided.

Analyzing The Pvcs Documents: A Multimodal Rate-Based Approach To Understand Community’S Goals And Values, Anastasia Sergeeva, Bogdan Kirillov, Ekaterina Voronina

Proceedings from the Document Academy

A significant amount of modern professional communication takes place in the so-called Virtual Communities of Practice or Professional Virtual Communities (PVCs): social systems of individuals who use Information Technologies to mediate their relationships and facilitate knowledge exchange and generation. In current research we analyze one of the biggest Russian IT-PVCs, Habrahabr.ru. The community’s official goal is connecting the IT-specialists; communication takes form of users articles and comments; users can rate the articles, the comments and the other users themselves. Using the number of SNA instruments, community’s metadata, linguistics statistics and discourse analysis we show the structure of the community, main …

Digital Engagement: Personality Is The Context Of The Text, Diane C. Spencer-Scarr

Proceedings from the Document Academy

This paper examines digital-technology as a tool and an environment with the individuals’ personality at the intersection of the two: Its impact on social memory and the unbound document. With the ubiquitous embedding of digital networked technology in society and the emergence of the unbounded document, humans increasingly obtain information by grasping snippets of decontextualized text sourced through non-human entities from globally dispersed databases that have stripped out context. Then in a Kafkian way humans’ have to build from the middle to make sense of the information snippets. The paper explores how the inherent nature of the individual can be …

Documenting Spatial And Temporal Information For Heritage Preservation: A Case Study Of Sri Lanka, Chiranthi Wijesundara, Shigeo Sugimoto, Bhuva Narayan

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Cultural Heritage Properties (CHPs) around the world have been altered or destroyed due to various unforeseen factors, both natural and human-made. Consequently, as a preparedness approach around such disasters, documenting the CHPs are crucial to any efforts to repair, rebuild or relocate them. With advancements in digital technologies, integrating them into our documentation to improve heritage preservation has become a common approach. Here the main concern is on Spatial and Temporal (ST) information and the paper proposes that with recent developments in the field of Geospatial technologies, heritage preservation can be enhanced and improved by documenting ST information parallel to …

Using Heider’S Epistemology Of Thing And Medium For Unpacking The Conception Of Documents: Gantt Charts And Boundary Objects, Sebastian K. Boell, Florian Hoof

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Documents play a central role for many organizational processes. Current conceptualizations of documents predominantly engage with documents in two different ways. One sees documents as things with specific properties, and a second sees documents as medium enabling communication across different groups of actors. What is currently not well understood is how documents are perceived either as thing or as medium. This chapter engages with this issue by drawing from Fritz Heider’s epistemology of thing and medium, a concept stemming from social and media theory. According to Heider things are uniform and medium are multiform. Applying this concept to documents we …

Wikia: Between Documentary Simulacra And Documented Fictions, Caroline Courbières, Sabine Roux

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Wikis are digital community spaces that have attracted high traffic but virtually no study as socio-communicational platforms. These platforms offer individuals the possibility of engaging in unique writing activities by defining a distinct material configuration and imposing a protocol of enunciation. Wikis are platforms developed through the contributions of anyone, and constitute collaborative encyclopedias dedicated to a cultural topic. This article more specifically examines the Harry Potter Wiki, which is devoted to the literary universe of J.K. Rowling. Our semio-communicational analysis concerns the structure, the authors and the contents of the French and Anglo-Saxon versions of this wiki. First we …

Interpretations Of Patterns And Actors In The Lapp Fund Documents, Geir Grenersen

Proceedings from the Document Academy

The Lapp Fund (“Finnefondet” in Norwegian) was an important instrument in the norwegianization policy toward the Sámi and Finnish minorities between 1852 – 1921. Two studies, one from the midst 1950s (Dahl 1957) and one from the early 1980s (Eriksen & Niemi 1981), have been the standard works on this period. Recent archival studies (Grenersen N.d. & Maliniemi 2009, 2010) prove the need for a new look at the Lapp Fund documents. Through a detailed archival study Maliniemi has shown that the Sámi and the Finnish languages was much used in a local political administration. But the documents written in …

Docam 2014 Founders Lecture: Photocutionary Acts, Selfies And Public Knowledge, Brian C. O'Connor

Proceedings from the Document Academy

This paper is drawn from the DOCAM 2014 Founders Lecture Selfies and Public Knowledge: DOCAM 2014 Founders Lecture, "Selfies and Public Knowledge: Technology & Situational Documents"

Instantiation: Academia's Pop-Up Museum, Corina M. Iannaggi, Kiersten F. Latham

Proceedings from the Document Academy

This article provides an overview of the creation and installation of the Document Academy (DOCAM) 2014 Instantiation, an experimental exhibition intended to develop a three dimensional representation of the DOCAM 2014 participants’ spoken presentations. During the installation process, it was evident that the Instantiation resembled a current trend in the museum profession known as “The Pop-Up Museum.” An evaluation of the Instantiation in the context of the Pop-Up Museum uncovered a similar core objective, the ability to create meaningful conversations centered around the participants’ documents on display. This objective was supported by participants’ responses to follow-up questions about their …

Transmedial Documentation For Non-Visual Image Access, Melody J. Mccotter

Proceedings from the Document Academy

In my doctoral studies on information accessibility for the individual who is blind or visually impaired, I’ve been exploring the ways we can make image documents more accessible. This requires using an alternative sensory modality, and translating the document into a different format. The questions that arise when we consider this process are many, but among them are:

• Is it the same document once we’ve converted it to an audio narrative about the work, or a 3D topographic map of an artwork, or a musical interpretation?
• If it is not the same document, how truthful can the “trans-medial” translation be …