What information scientists and documentarians have considered to be a
'document' according to the technical use of the word is not
neccessarily the common usage. Largely, the traditional 'documentarian'
approach is that something is a 'document' when it's been collected to
serve as 'evidence' (with that word also somewhat broadly understood). A
specimen would certainly qualify there.
Here's one blog essay explaining why information science has generally
felt it appropriate to expand the technical definition of 'document'.
http://blog.vamosa.com/blog/?p=507
That blog essay goes into 'metadata' a bit too, in a way worth reading,
also coming down on the side of "whether it's metadata or not is
contextual": "In one situation the photograph is a document, described
by metadata from a digital camera (exposure, shutterspeed), in the other
situation it is metadata describing the antelope." Either way, that
blog post is good for putting some of the issues out there that
"problematize" the concepts of 'document' and 'metadata'.
After all, the common popular conception of 'document' is probably
limited to purely textual works, or perhaps works written on paper only;
or more recently, perhaps anything that's a computer file. But we know
we need to deal with both textual works on paper, and graphical works on
any medium, and computer files, and in some cases even three dimensional
'realia', and we pretty much need to deal with them as a class, the
class of technically defined 'documents'.
Jonathan
Thomas Krichel wrote:
> Simon Spero writes
>
>
>> A butterfly *specimen* **is** data; it is a document,
>>
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specimen
>
> suggests to me that Wikipedia does not think it is a document.
>
>
> Cheers,
>
> Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel
> http://authorclaim.org/profile/pkr1
> skype: thomaskrichel
>
>
Received on Mon Jan 25 2010 - 15:27:59 EST