Sorry, I should also have mentioned Michael K. Buckland's
"What is a document?", in _Journal of the American Society
for Information Science_ 48..9 (1997), p.804-809 ( dealing
inter alia, like the blog post, with Briet and antelopes ).
It furthermore occurred to me that, in connection with this
question of what a document is, it may also be worth
mentioning the work of Bernd Frohmann leading up to and
including his _Deflating information : From science studies
to documentation_ (Toronto : University of Toronto Press,
2004). Some of his earlier work amounted to quite interesting
thought pieces for ideas such as that of the construction of
the information user, but I did have some significant troubles
with the book mentioned above, and one might be well
advised to have a look, also, at the review by John Buschman
in _C&RL_ 66.5 (2005), p.473-475. In a later article
( "Documentary ethics, ontology, and politics", _Archival
science_ 8.3 (2008), p.165-180 ), Frohmann deals with the
document as "ontologically generative", and he gave a paper
at DOCAM '06 in Berkeley in 2006 entitled "Revisiting
'What is a document?'" ( not published ? ). It was part of a
session called "Document theory" -- which e.g. also had a
paper with the title "Walks like a doc, talks like a doc" ( on
oral documents ) by Turner, Feinberg and Holland
( http://thedocumentacademy.org/resources/2006/papers/Turner%20et%20al%20DOCAM06.pdf ).
The event yielded other relevant approaches to what a
document is and does, such as that of Zacklad. See
http://thedocumentacademy.org/resources/2006/program.html.
- Laval Hunsucker
Amsterdam, Nederland
----- Original Message ----
From: Laval Hunsucker <amoinsde_at_YAHOO.COM>
To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Sent: Tue, January 26, 2010 11:49:47 AM
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] (Meta)Data was: [NGC4LIB] LIBER Quarterly Article on Europeana
> 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.
Odd perhaps that there's no mention here -- or in that ( strangely
commentless ? ) blog post -- of the article that might qualify as a
sort of _locus classicus_ concerning the matter, by : Linda
Schamber, "What is a document? Rethinking the concept in
uneasy times", _Journal of the American Society for Information
Science_ 47..9 (1996), p.669-671 ( From the abstract : "This
essay describes the challenge of redefining the fundamental
concept of "document" that underlies their [ i.e., "information
professionals'" ] apprehensions about changes in information
generation, control, and access, along with their apprehensions
about the future of the information professions." ). Also perhaps
intersting here is Ziming Liu , "The evolution of documents and
its impacts", _Journal of documentation_ 60.3 (2004), p.279-288
( From the abstract : "By looking back on their evolution, we are
able to see how the notions and functions of documents change
over time, and the resulting impacts on individuals, organizations,
and society." ). And related : Hur-Li Lee, "What is a collection?",
_Journal of the American Society for Information Science_ 51.12
(2000), p.1106-1113..
Not that they can come close to settling the matter, but they'll
probably give to many some useful food for further thought ( --
which is what it's all about, anyway ).
- Laval Hunsucker
Amsterdam, Nederland
----- Original Message ----
From: Jonathan Rochkind <rochkind_at_JHU.EDU>
To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Sent: Mon, January 25, 2010 9:27:30 PM
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] (Meta)Data was: [NGC4LIB] LIBER Quarterly Article on Europeana
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 Tue Jan 26 2010 - 07:57:59 EST