Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Transformations Documentaires Et Milieu Culturel (1948), Robert Pagès

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Original French text of the article "Documentary Transformations and Cultural Context," by Robert Pagès. The article originally appeared in Review of Documentation, Volume 15 Iss. 3, pp. 53–64. Republished with the kind permission of Yves Pagès.

Documentary Transformations And Cultural Context, Robert Pagès

Proceedings from the Document Academy

This article is a translation of one originally published in 1948 in Review of Documentation. The article examines the relationship between documents, broadly defined, and culture. More specifically, it examines the connections between experience, reason and the stability of documents as media technologies evolve over time.

Introduction To Robert Pagès’ “Documentary Transformations And Cultural Context”, Michael K. Buckland

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Robert Pagès (1919-2007) was an anarchist activist who later became director of a major social psychology research laboratory. Between these roles he was a student in documentation established in Paris by Suzanne Briet and others at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers. In 1947 while he was a student of documentation Pagès submitted a thesis entitled “Transformations documentaires et milieu culturel” (Documentary transformations and cultural context) which was published as an article in the Review of Documentation in 1948. A key theme was that documentation is to culture what machinery is to industry. This introduction situates and explains some …

Documental Fixity, Asy Sanches, Ronald E. Day

Proceedings from the Document Academy

The article discusses the concept of fixity in documents and documentality. Issues of control and power are discusses as related to these concepts.

Rhizome Blues: Introducing Document Teratology, Arthur Perret, Olivier Le Deuff, Clément Borel

Proceedings from the Document Academy

The aim of this paper is to defend a richer theoretical understanding of what we call monsters, and to argue for the development of document teratology, which we see as an important scientific issue for documentology. We start from the premise that the default state of communication is incommunication, and that documentation, developed to counter this, seems to have become overwhelmed from the inside by its own problematic development. We then discuss the opportunity of a document teratology, based on nuanced description of what the word monster means. We describe two strong imperatives, monstration and categorisation, and the tension between …

Embracing Monsters, Laurie J. Bonnici, Brian C. O'Connor

Proceedings from the Document Academy

We propose monsters are documents. Monsters show us, make evident to us, teach us. An exploration of five monsters, both popular and unknown, reveals they fit within a standard model of message making; the binary nature of that model separates meaning from message enabling explanation of evolving interpretations of a monster. We examine the coding and decoding of monster documents through a functional ontology lens. We posit that monsters defy protype and thus serve as attempts at documenting the undocumented. Simultaneously monsters present clues to understanding through imagery that spans the unfamiliar and the familiar allowing the recipient to engage …

Navigating Monsters: Credibility In The Twittersphere, Carrie A. Boettcher

Proceedings from the Document Academy

The increasing use of OSM during emergency, or potentially threatening, situations creates conditions in which emergency planners and responders need a high level of investigative skill to weed through a dynamic information landscape to determine the quality of information to contribute to improved situation awareness. This weeding process transforms the big data environment of OSM to focused information retrieval. Inquiry into indicators of quality in OSM (authority, objectivity, currency, coverage, and glyphicality) during severe weather situations informs how OSM impacts the information behavior of the severe weather enterprise of the U. S. Specifically, this paper focuses on investigation into how …

“What Is Truly Scandinavian?”—A Sas Commercial And The Document Complex Surrounding It, Roswitha Skare

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Scandinavian airlines (SAS) published a video (2:43 minutes long) under the title “What is truly Scandinavian?” on February 11, 2020, on the company’s social media sites. The ad was removed later that day, and a new and shorter version was published the day after. This paper takes a closer look on the video and the reactions on it. By focusing on the official Facebook-page of Scandinavian airlines and a range of documents that were published by SAS and others, the document complex surrounding the film is discussed in terms of connectivity and transformation.

Ishi, Briet's Antelope, And The Documentality Of Human Documents, Martin I. Nord

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Ishi, the “last wild Indian in North America,” was “discovered” in 1911 and spent the last years of his life living in an anthropology museum. There he was studied by anthropologists and viewed by the public as a living exhibit. In this paper, I take some initial steps in arguing that Ishi, the person, became a document to most people. The similarities between Ishi and Suzanne Briet’s hypothetical antelope, newly discovered and placed in a zoo, are eerie. Ishi, like the antelope, is brought into public knowledge as both an initial document and a wide variety of secondary documents derived …

Three Monstrosities Of Information, Ronald E. Day

Proceedings from the Document Academy

This article discusses three of my books and the types of information monstrosities they present.

Books And Imaginary Being(S): The Monstrosity Of Library Classifications, Melissa Adler, Greg Nightingale

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Thomas Jefferson sold his personal library and its classified catalog to the Library of Congress after the original library was burned in the War of 1812. He viewed the act of submitting his collection to the U.S. Congress as a means to inscribe his legacy and political agenda into the intellectual and cultural realm of the nation. Jorge Luis Borges was both a municipal librarian and the Librarian for the National Library of Argentina, as well as a prolific fiction and poetry writer. Borges’s fictions are a kind of catalogue in and of themselves, in which all books, all ideas, …

Seeing Indonesian Ghost Films Through Document Theory, — Suprayitno, Dian Novita Fitriani, Rusdan Kamil, — Rahmi

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Hantu, or ghosts, are portrayed as the incarnation of monstrous or evil souls wishing to harm humans. Most modern Indonesians still believe in ghosts, as suggested by a growing number of ghost films in recent years. From the 1970s until the present, more than 320 ghost films have been made and can be differentiated according to each culture, custom, and religion in Indonesia. Indonesian people believe that ghost films in Indonesia are scarier than ghost films from abroad because of a symbolic bond between ghosts and traditional myths represented in the films. This paper aims to understand ghost films …

The Brazilian Neodocumentalist Movement: An Historical Perspective, Gabriela Fernanda Ribeiro Rodrigues

Proceedings from the Document Academy

This article presents early studies on the repercussion of the neo-documentation movement in Brazilian Information Science, through a literary review on the history and evolution of Documentation in Brazil. Some currently approached questions by Brazilian researchers are presented here, with regard to the document and documentation under the neo-documentation perspective. Based on the work of these Brazilian researchers, by means of reconstituting the theoretical steps in the construction of these researches, it is traced to the pathways that indicate an original Brazilian Information Science neo-documentation movement. It is recommended that the subject be widely explored in the future, for being …

The Dragonslayer: Folktale Classification, Memetics, And Cataloguing, Alex Mayhew

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Tales of great heroes overcoming great monsters have been a part of storytelling since time immemorial. Some of these tales follow recurring patterns, and one such pattern is that of ‘The Dragonslayer.’ From tales of Tristan and Iseult and Saint George and the Dragon, to the confrontation with the dragon Smaug in The Hobbit, ‘The Dragonslayer’ has been an enduring example of a recurring pattern in storytelling.

Different knowledge organization systems seek to arrange and connect texts and their recurring patterns in different ways. Folklorists look for recurring motifs and some wiki editors look for common tropes in …

Documentary Ghosts, Tim Gorichanaz

Proceedings from the Document Academy

This paper explores how they documents provide evidence, particularly in anomalous cases, where the evidence is specious. I suggest that it is fruitful to consider such cases with the metaphor of ghosts, as ghosts suggest a breakdown in our everyday understandings of the link between life and death. I describe three types of ghosts and consequently three types of documentary ghosts. Documentary Ghost 1 is a document whose object no longer exists; Documentary Ghost 2 is a document that seems to evince one object, but upon scrutiny it evinces something else; and Documentary Ghost 3 is a document that seems …

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 …

A Research Program For Studying Lams And Community In The Digital Age, Andreas Vårheim, Roswitha Skare, Noah Lenstra, Kiersten F. Latham, Geir Grenersen

Proceedings from the Document Academy

The paper outlines a research effort into the changing representations, policies, strategies, activities, and practices of libraries, archives, and museums (LAMs) in the digital age. Comprehensive social changes including big slow-moving processes, such as aging populations, global migration, technological change, and environmental change, expose communities and LAM institutions to vulnerabilities. How do the institutions handle vulnerabilities, how do they become more resilient, and how do they contribute to building the resilience of their local communities?

The Public Library And Social Media: A Case Study From Tromsø, Norway, Roswitha Skare

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Historically, archives, libraries and museums (ALM) have been perceived as institutions providing infrastructure for an open and enlightened public discourse. The Norwegian Public Libraries Act focuses on public libraries being providers of knowledge and cultural expressions, agents of popular enlightenment, local meeting places and arenas of debate and participation in the public sphere. But public libraries are also supposed to keep up with the technological development and to offer digital services to the inhabitants of their municipality. This paper presents the first findings of an ongoing research project investigating the relationship between physical meetings at the Tromsø public library and …

The Wonders Of The Augsburg Cabinet: Three Ways Of Experiencing A Document, Kiersten F. Latham

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Since even before Frohmann (2009) proposed his document analysis on the meaning of cabinets of curiosity, I have been fascinated with them. Their emergence in the 15th century (MacGregor, 2007) is also the tantalizing beginnings of the birth of the modern museum. In museum studies, we often ask what the meaning of the museum is today (Latham & Simmons, 2014); I believe that part of the answer to this question is in these curious compartmentalized pieces of furniture that held the wonders of the world and helped users make meaning a very long time ago.

One can see examples of …

Disciplines Derived From The Discovery Of Historical Archives, Yongsheng Chen, Huanning Su

Proceedings from the Document Academy

This paper reviews four famous areas of study in China that emerged from the discovery of historical archives to become their own disciplines. Through a literature review, this paper analyzes the importance of historical archives for forming disciplines by introducing the origin, development, research objectives and research contents of these four disciplines. Based on that, this paper finally suggests that people’s attention to archives is the biggest reason for forming disciplines. By discussing the reasons for accelerating the combination of studies and historical archives, this paper gives suggestions for archives management.