In: Roswitha Skare, Niels Windfeld Lund, Andreas Vårheim (eds.) (2007): "A Document (Re)turn". Frankfurt am Main, Peter Lang,pp. 135-151 Reprinted with permission.
The notion of text has a long tradition inside the human science. A broad definition of this concept considers all man-made products as systems of signs and thereby as texts; but often not “as the physical manifestation as such, but as the abstract representation of a work” (Gunder: 2001, 86). Considering that everything – including sculpture, music, photography and film – can become a text, either a written text – like literature in a traditional sense – or a verbal text, one can at least wonder whether the concept is useful or not.
The notion of document with roots back to ancient times can be considered as multifaceted as the notion of text, but today’s literary critics or art scholars would probably hesitate to use this concept on literary texts or works of art. Speaking about literature as documents, art as documents, food or cloth as documents and so on, Documentation science at the University of Tromsø provokes many humanists. But if anything can be a document as well as a text – what difference does it really make if we are using the one or the other concept?
In this paper I will investigate the notion of document in comparison to the notion of text by means of some literary examples. Focusing on different aspects of literary works, I will try to argue that both concepts can exist side by side.
Description:
Paper presented at DOCAM ’04, University of California, Berkeley,
October 22-24, 2004
In this article the poetry of Jakov Polonskij is compared to Afanasij Fet's verse with a special focus on the motif "night". A juxtaposition of parallel passages demonstrates both similarities and profound differences: on the one hand, Polonskij is familiar with the various aspects of verse technique so brilliantly applied by Fet, while on the other hand he avoids the erotically coloured emotional climax which often concludes Fet's poems. In Polonskij a joyful mood is combined with dissonant notes of doubt and disillusion.
The Lullehačorrugrottan cave in the Torneträsk area of northern Sweden was originally surveyed to 1145 m by Gunnar Rasmusson 50 years ago. Later surveys in 2003 added 267 m of new cave passages (grade 2). In March 2007 a Norwegian / Swedish joint expedition explored and partly surveyed the continuation of one of the passages discovered in 2003. The benefit of winter caving is low water level, because of no liquid precipitation for half a year. 87 m passage (discovered in 2003) was surveyed to grade 5 and an estimated 85 m completely new passage was surveyed to grade 2. This article focus on the exploration of this new passage and the challenges the expedition faced in remote areas and arctic winter.
This article is chiefly concerned with Wallace Stegner’s ideas of aridity as the key to the understanding of the history and culture of the American West. It first examines the arguments of some major books published in the 1980s that helped strengthen Stegner’s conviction that the West was heading towards environmental disaster due to the rapidly increasing depletion of its rivers and aquifers, a projected ecological crisis that has grown even more acute at the beginning of the 21st century. The subsequent focus of this article, however, is on Stegner’s predominant proposition that the abuse of the arid nature of the West – the rampant disregard of its environmental limitations – is a product of a mindset and a culture that he finds particularly Western. In the course of his analysis, Stegner sees the rootlessness that typified his own family history as a direct reflection of the transientness characteristic of the collective history of the American West, which served to hamper the evolution of a sense of place that in his view is the prerequisite for a genuine stewardship of the land.
The Sámis are the indigenous population of Northern Scandinavia. When the oppressive policy against the Sámi population in Norway was lightened during the 1960s, many Sámi communities established language and cultural centers for documentation and development of their language and cultural heritage as the oral tradition lost its ground in the modernization process. This paper aims to discuss how Sámi cultural centers use documentation both as a way of remembering the past and as a political strategy in order to produce evidence for land and water claims.
The Sámi centers are many-faceted institutions and document theory is suggested as a theoretical perspective in order to analyze why these institutions were established and how they are functioning today.
Two cases are presented. The first shows how the centers use documentation as a technique for restoring the past. The second is a ruling in the Norwegian High Court that shows a new turn in what can be accepted as documents proving indigenous land and water claims. This article is an attempt to introduce document theory as an analytical tool for analyzing the documentation processes in indigenous cultural centers.
Correct Dewey classification is demanding and time consuming. Many of the challenges with the Dewey system are related to locating and interpreting notes (i.e. classification guidelines), and number building. Today’s Dewey structure is a result of more than 100 years of optimizing a comprehensive classification system to the printed book medium. In order to limit the system into a “manageable” size, facets and facet-like subjects are represented only once and instead referred to from relevant classes for number building. A similar technique is used to reduce the number of notes. With the remediation of Dewey from printed to computer media, space is not limited and there is no need to compress the classification system. Number building can be eliminated, and all relevant notes attached to each class. Despite the fact that the system now has been available in electronic form for almost 20 years, it is still largely a copy of the printed version. This article first investigates how the Dewey system may be presented for users without number building, in order to make it more immediate and user-friendly. We first analyze the Dewey structure, and then look at different representations of the structure suited for computer media. Finally, some ideas for a new presentation without number building are proposed.