Niels Windfeld Lund

Document, text and medium: concepts, theories and disciplines

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is first to provide a critical conceptual discussion of different use of the notion of text, especially in the case of expressions including words as well as images, second to consider the notion of document as an alternative to the notion of text, and finally to lay out a theoretical ground for a broad discipline of documentation studies.Design/methodology/approach – The approach took the form of a conceptual analysis of a number of works in media and literary studies.Findings – There were found a number of cases of contradictory use of the notion of text within the same work, talking about text in a broad overall sense covering all media as well as text as a distinctive concept separating words from images, while it was found through a conceptual history of the notion of document that the latter notion not only covers a written paper, but multiple media.Research limitations/implications – In future research, one should consider the use of document as the concept for t...

Boyd Rayward, Documentation, and Information Science

W. Boyd Rayward is best known as the biographer of Paul Otlet and as a historian of documentation, but he has also always been concerned with contemporary services and with the nature of information science. Less well known and certainly less well documented is his exceptional indirect influence through correspondence, encouragement, conferences, and the building of informal networks. We provide an informal account of some of Rayward’s influence during the past twenty-five years in building a more complete and historically informed understanding of information science.

Document Analysis (DA) as a Sociotechnical Design Framework for HCI: A Novel Tele-psychiatric Service as a Case Study

We present a novel sociotechnical analysis framework; a document model and a first attempt at utilizing it in an information systems design context. We argue document analysis (DA) to be a holistic framework that encompasses technical, cognitive and social aspects of the system and may act as boundary objects to communicate the system model effectively between stakeholders, designers and engineers.

Leaving twentieth-century understanding of documents

In this essay we present a scenario of the future of an e-book and in the light of this scenario we discuss some issues and implications of such an artifact. Central to this scenario are issues of technology, digitalism, choice- or survival of technologies, ethics, economics, standardization and choice- and adoption of such standards and - finally - concepts and tools to talk about such artifacts. The latter issue, we argue, is both input into the discussion of what a document is and an argument for adoption of a new definition and concept of a document. Most of all, this essay is meant as a comment in order to provoke reflection of what technology might bring and briefly discuss how already present technology has given us some insight into these issues already. In this context, we take one step backwards and discuss an underlying concept of documents and documentation in light of digitization and how digitization can build a digital ecosystem based on what used to be denoted a book, today an e-book, in the future - a digital ecosystem, yet to be labelled.