Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

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 …

From Object To Mediator: The Agency Of Documents, Sally Irvine-Smith

Proceedings from the Document Academy

This paper takes as a starting point one particular development in social theory – the concept of mediation – and applies it to the document. Central to this discussion is a conceptualisation of documents as objects, albeit one which fails if we assume the document to be nothing more than a receptacle of content. Drawing from contemporary social theories which give mediating objects a pivotal role in human affairs, many researchers find that viewing documents as mediators allows us to concentrate on function over content. Indeed, evidence indicates that viewing documents as mediating objects is well accepted and largely unproblematic. …

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 …

The Becoming Of Human Rights Documents: An Exploration Of A Social Media Campaign, Hilary Yerbury, Ahmed Shahid

Proceedings from the Document Academy

This study explores the social media campaign related to the disappearance of a journalist in the Maldives in August 2014. At a simple level, this study asks whether the Facebook and Twitter hashtag postings meet the standards of a human rights document. At a more complex level, using Genette’s concept of transtextuality, it explores the relationships between the social media campaign and its relationships to statements made by human rights NGOs, by UN agencies and in foreign parliaments. Although the social media campaign does not meets the standards of a human rights document, contributions from other agencies would unquestionably be …

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 …

Documenting The Information-Seeking Experience Of Remedial Undergraduate Students, Shelley Blundell

Proceedings from the Document Academy

As presented at DOCAM’14, this proceedings paper discusses my ongoing dissertation research: Documenting the information-seeking experience of undergraduate students enrolled in a remedial English course at a 4-year state university in Ohio, United States. Because the information behaviors, needs, and information literacy abilities of these students are understudied areas in library and information science and higher education literature; I chose to investigate these areas in my dissertation research toward contributing research to this gap, using descriptive phenomenological (qualitative) methodology to do so. Although secondary data analysis is still in progress, this paper presents findings from primary analysis (a necessary step …

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"

Listening To Shells And Discovering A Lost World; Epiphanic Experiences At The Museum, Catherine M.C. Closet-Crane

Proceedings from the Document Academy

This paper aims to entertain the possibilities for analysis, interpretation, and learning offered by evocative autoethnographic texts for LAM and LIS user studies. The focus in this paper is on storytelling as autoethnographic writing. To illustrate facets of a particular cultural experience and start a conversation about the transformative power of museum objects as documents, the story told in this paper recounts a series of events and experiences from the life of two visitors after their museum encounter with an engraved shell artifact from the archeological site of Spiro Mounds in Oklahoma.

Facebook - A Document Without Borders?, Roswitha Skare, Niels W. Lund

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Facebook (FB) has since its birth in 2004 as a site for students on Harvard campus grown to become one of the largest site on the net at all, both when it comes to writers and readers across ages, genders, cultures and continents and one may wonder if FB is a document without borders at all and if it is a book as it claims in its name.

We will try to use some of the conceptual tools we have used in former documentation studies like Gerard Genette’s concept of paratext and discuss if it is necessary to use other …

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 …

An (Un)Session: A Copy Of A Fake Of The Identical Facsimile Reproduced From The Real Original, Kiersten F. Latham, Corina M. Iannaggi

Proceedings from the Document Academy

This paper describes one session from the 2014 Document Academy that used an atypical presentation style inspired by the unconference trend. The session explored the meaning and language used to describe and discuss representations of documents and was purposefully open-ended by design. By incorporating the Document Academy participants as active members of the presentation, we were able to create a space that encouraged the sharing of thoughts and expertise leading to rich discussion of the proposed topic. Here we provide an overview of the process which led to a session centered around collaboration and interaction with the audience and provide …

Words Matter: Documents Of The Departed, Thomas Atwood

Proceedings from the Document Academy

As families begin to experience the passing of loved ones from a ‘silent generation’, they will be forced to make decisions about the physical belongings of those who lived in a Depression Era mentality. Some of these choices will be easy, as one may possess little sentiment over a clock or a set of dishes. Other decisions will be trying, as these items will surely invoke conversations that make us reconsider the meaning of the words keep, want, need, and discard. This paper discusses the documents of Dr. Lloyd Mills (1927-2013), Professor Emeritus of English, at Kent State University. For …

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 …

Documentary Borders: Reality Or Illusion, Sabine Roux, Caroline Courbières

Proceedings from the Document Academy

The concept of border of document allows us to deploy the significant content of a document in several regimes of meaning. A document can be studied as a semiotic mediation according its communicational intention (intention to inform, intention to signify, intention to inform oneself, intention to interpretate). After studying those values of the document, the question is about whether a documentary border persists unchanged when regimes of meaning are updated. The slipping of documentary borders is examined through the content of the diverse works of Jocelyn Bonnerave. His doctoral thesis in anthropology documenting practices in performing arts influenced his theatrical …