Iranian Journal of Information Processing & Management (Sep 2022)
Analysis of the concept of "document" from the perspective of the tradition of documentation and neo-documentation
Abstract
The Documentation Movement was formed in Europe in the late nineteenth century by leadership of Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine, with the primary goal of establishing international mechanisms for organizing information and knowledge through which all kinds of documents could be collected, organized, and accessible. One of the characteristics of this historical event was the increasingly theoretical treatment of the concept of document as a discourse concept in the field of information. This approach is being revived in recent years under the name of neo-documentation.The purpose of this work is to analyze the conceptual dimensions of "document" from the perspective of the documentation literature and especially neo-documentation. In the field of documentaion literature, the theories of Paul Otlet and Suzanne Briet are emphasized, and in the field of neo-documentation literature, the theories of Lund, Buckland, Irvine-Smith, and Hjorland are emphasized. The research is pure basic in terms of purpose and conceptual analysis in terms of method and data collection. Also in this research, conceptual analysis has been used with the aim of "concept interpretation" and as far as possible to gain a more accurate understanding of the studied concept. The results showed that former review research on the subject has recognized two general approaches to conceptualizing document, namely, "document-as-object approach" (inspired by positivism and with emphasis on the objectivity component) and "document-as-medium approach" (inspired by the hermeneutic tradition). The present study identifies three other approaches and adds to this categorization which include: the "integrated approach" (with a comprehensive emphasis on the physical, mental, and social aspects of the document), the " document-as-agent approach" (with emphasis on the concept of agency), and the "Hjorland's intradisciplinary approach" (with emphasis on the concept of context, reference to the tradition of documentation, and the bibliographic paradigm). In addition, researchers have proposed adding a new dimension to the integrated approach. Researchers believe that because of the importance of the "power" and "discourse" components in relation to knowledge, information, and document, adding a "power relations dimension" to Lund's integrated approach could lead to a more comprehensive understanding of the document from a variety of technical, Social, intellectual-content, as well as discourse perspective.
