Sintaxis alfabética y representación textual: de las bibliotecas y la mediación de sus catálogos

Abstract

What is the problem that digital catalogues pose for the humanities? Where does it come from? How can we solve it? The following article deals with a layer of literary studies and access to books that is not usually accounted for: their classification and its limitations. I aim to offer some tentative answers to the questions raised. To this end, I critically approach the rationalizing and normalizing principles of the discipline of «Documentation Science», giving an account of it as a scientific specialization of the sensitivity proper to the Enlightment humanism. Next, I offer some case studies using the digital catalogues of the Complutense University of Madrid, Princeton University and WorldCat. With these examples, I show that the «controlled languages» of the libraries limit divergent and radical experiences of writing and reading in unethical ways. To conclude, I propose opening catalogues up to the OCR reading technology, as a possible alternative to the exclusionary logics that determine the current indexical system.

Keywords

• humanidades
• catálogos
• ilustración
• modernidad
• lingüística documental
• bibliotecas
• alfabeto