Abstract
Three contributions are made to understanding the nature of documents. A survey of definitions of "document" from the last century shows that those definitions which most accurately reflect the ways in which the term "document" is used in practice are typically compound definitions, consisting of two or three elements that each refer to a different function of documents: medium, message, and meaning. Locating documents in E. J. Lowe's four-category ontology results in consideration of documents as universals rather than as particulars. Analysis of B. Smith's theory of document acts suggest that all documents, not just the ones that are involved in declarations, are creative in the special sense that they are generative of quasi-abstract entities of the kind that collectively comprise social reality.
Highlights
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The philosopher Barry Smith has been talking about the ontology of documents since at least 2005, and part of my goal today is to shine the DOCAM lamp on his work
The second section of the talk introduces the idea of category theory, a branch of the philosophical subfield of ontology, whose contributors work towards the identification of the most fundamental categories of things that exist in the world
Summary
Volume 6 Issue 1 Proceedings from the 2019 Annual Meeting of the Document Academy 2019. First of all, building from Michael Buckland’s well-known paper “What is a document?,” I shall present a brief survey of definitions of “document” from the last century or so. Some further definitions of “document” cited by Buckland, all except the last focusing on the supposed materiality of documents, are listed in Table 1 (emphases added). (Buckland’s translation of Briet’s definition—which begins “any physical or symbolic sign ...” (emphasis added)— might seem to contradict this inference, but other authorities cited by Buckland certainly lie in the explicitly materialist camp; see Table 1.) We might call definitions of this kind definitions of document-as-medium, since the idea they promote is of documents as media, vehicles, or channels, for the storage and/or carrying of messages.
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