New horizons of book science and bibliography

Abstract

Abstract: In contrast to the sciences, that were formed gradually and in many ways spontaneously, the development of bibliological disciplines was based on their theoretical comprehension without the expectation that they would all arise naturally. The central question remains unclear: is bibliology and its derivatives (library science, bibliography science) a complex of scientific disciplines or a complex discipline? In most cases, their union is limited to separate concepts that unite an established range of problems. This article aims to consider theoretical questions about the book and the bibliography as properties of living systems: what is their purpose, how do they “work” in the body, how do they arise in the course of evolution and how do they behave? Based on the achievements of neuroscience, first of all, on the research of Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences K. V. Anokhin and his colleagues, the author considers the book as an external cognitome. It is a complete, alienated system of subjective experience formed in an organism in the process of evolution, individual development and learning. In other words, the book is already in us, it is already “embedded” in the body. The author must not invent it, he must translate it. Therefore bibliography can be viewed as a superstructure over an external cognitome. This is a network over a network, i. e. a hypernet. The main general theory is the understanding of the mechanism of interaction of three elements: books (kniga in Russian – K) and (in Russian– I) a bibliography (bibliografiya in Russian – B) – these stands for KIB, where I (and) is the key element. The article considers the issues of reading as a challenge for the brain and thinking in the digital age. Particular attention is paid to “distant reading” (F. Moretti) by using Digital Humanities. F. Moretti's predecessor was the Russian researcher B. I. Yarkho (1889–1942). It concludes that the general theory of science about a book and bibliography should be based on three components: 1) understanding the mechanism of the relationship between a book as an external cognitome and bibliography as a hypertext (KIB); 2) exploring the study of close and distant reading in the digital age; 3) the formation of the foundations of the theory exact study of bibliography.