Proceedings from the Document Academy (original) (raw)
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The aim of this article is to demonstrate how documentation analysis with a neo-documentalist lens can help us explore variations (and stabilities) in conceptions and materialities of documents, as intertwined with disciplinary and sub-disciplinary practices of informing and knowing. Drawing on documentation theory, and with previous research on archaeological documentation as a background, by means of autoethnographic vignettes we explore contemporary conceptions of documentation in five areas in or related to archaeology (Intra-site 3D documentation, Development-led archaeology, Aggregating documentation for use outside the organization, Mediating documentation – or documentation mediation, and Documenting and displaying archaeology in a changing environment). Digitization, and how digitization has spurred renegotiations of what counts as documentation, functions as a common denominator discussed in all of the vignettes. The analysis highlights simultaneously ongoing renegotiations of documentation serving each area’s unique epistemic purposes, and pushing document materialities in different directions. This operationalization of documentation analysis creates an understanding for intra-disciplinary variations in documentation but is importantly also a practical tool to uncover documentation-related premises of disciplinary knowledge-making. This tool can be applied for example in processes of information policy development (regulating what purposes documentation should serve, and what it should be like), information systems design (e.g. for creation and communication of documentation), and infrastructure development (e.g. for preservation and accessibility of documentation).
Document, documentation, and the Document Academy: introduction
Archival Science, 2008
A series of efforts starting in the late nineteenth century to manage the increase in documents came to be knows as ''documentation.'' Leaders included Paul Otlet and Suzanne Briet. The concern was with access to evidence and the meaning of ''document'' was broadened to include any sign preserved to represent phenomena. Legal deposit, when extended to new modern media, required new techniques and led to a new program in documentation at the University of Tromsø, Norway, in 1996. Niels Lund, Michael Buckland, and others collaborated in forming the Document Academy and organized a series of conferences.
Documentation, materiality, and autonomous agency of documentation
A Document (Re)turn: contributions from a research field in transition. Edited by Roswitha Skare, Niels W. Lund, and Andreas Vårheim. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2007
The growth of international interest in the "new" documentation, or "neo-documentation," can be traced to an impressive body of work now indispensable to the field, by Boyd Rayward, Michael Buckland, and Niels Windfeld Lund. Building upon Paul Otlet's and Suzanne Brier's pioneering ideas of the late nineteenth-to mid-twentieth century, these scholars have inaugurated new investigations of the relationships between documentary practices and a rich array of social, political, scientific, and cultural phenomena. The annual conferences of the Document Academy, which have been convened at the University of California, Berkeley since 2003, testify to the growing international interest in these relationships.
Title: Documentation for whom?
The Swedish context of documentation of collections is: ‘We do as we always have been told. We do not want to change the way of describing.’ And the explanation from registrars is that if we change the praxis, we have to update everything, from the beginning. That is described as not possible. From another angle, you can follow the changes over time and see the pattern of related aspects. I have in my research recognised strong links between (1) what is collected, (2) what metadata is collected and written down and (3) the structure of the catalogues. This is not surprising, but it is never explained, and the three aspects are nodes in a network of contemporary causes. The reasons for acquisition are mainly two: For research and for exhibition. But what the research and the exhibitions address depend on impacts from the society: what is possible to exhibit and what is possible in a scientific context to undertake at a certain time or period. My paper will discuss triggers and influences from scientific paradigms in the cataloguing. I will also discuss the lack of metadata about the systems and the history of cataloguing. I think it is most informative to understand under what circumstances the collections is collected.
Revisiting “what is a document?”
Journal of Documentation, 65 (2): 291-303, 2009
Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to provide a reconsideration of Michael Buckland's important question, "What is a document?", analysing the point and purpose of definitions of "document" and "documentation". Design/methodology/approach -Two philosophical notions of the point of definitions are contrasted: John Stuart Mill's concept of a "real" definition, purporting to specify the nature of the definiendum; and a concept of definition based upon a foundationalist philosophy of language. Both conceptions assume that a general, philosophical justification for using words as we do is always in order. This assumption is criticized by deploying Hilary Putnam's arguments against the orthodox Wittgensteinian interpretation of criteria governing the use of language. The example of the cabinets of curiosities of the sixteenth-century English and European virtuosi is developed to show how one might productively think about what documents might be, but without a definition of a document. Findings -Other than for specific, instrumentalist purposes (often appropriate for specific case studies), there is no general philosophical reason for asking, what is a document? There are good reasons for pursuing studies of documentation without the impediments of definitions of "document" or "documentation". Originality/value -The paper makes an original contribution to the new interest in documentation studies by providing conceptual resources for multiplying, rather than restricting, the areas of application of the concepts of documents and documentation.
Documentation redux: Prolegomenon to (another) philosophy of information
Library Trends, 52 (3): 387-407, 2004
A philosophy of information is grounded in a philosophy of documentation. Nunberg's conception of the phenomenon of information heralds a shift of attention away from the question "What is information?" toward a critical investigation of the sources and legitimation of the question itself. Analogies between Wittgenstein's deconstruction of philosophical accounts of meaning and a corresponding deconstruction of philosophical accounts of information suggest that because the informativeness of a document depends on certain kinds of practices with it, and because information emerges as an effect of such practices, documentary practices are ontologically primary to information. The informativeness of documents therefore refers us to the properties of documentary practices. These fall into four broad categories: their materiality; their institutional sites; the ways in which they are socially disciplined; and their historical contingency. Two examples from early modern science, which contrast the scholastic documentary practices of continental natural philosophers to those of their peers in Restoration England, illustrate the richness of the factors that must be taken into account to understand how documents become informing.