Suzanne Briet Research Articles

Is A Star A Document? Catalogued Students and Learning Analytics

AbstractThe media theorist Suzanne Briet proposed that through the recording of information about entities in the world, these entities are not only documented, but they themselves are rendered into documents. She asks us to consider the case of an antelope which is captured, brought to Europe, put in a zoo, and examined by experts and members of the public. She argues that the zoo is effectively a laboratory in which the antelope is analysed, displayed, and therefore itself becomes a document due to these material analytical assemblages around it. In this paper, I propose that Briet’s notion of the document can be applied to data visualisation used in learning analytics, and its effect on students. With reference to a philosophical discussion of the status of data visualisation in terms of Kant’s theory of the sublime versus Deleuze’s notion of the diagram, I argue that a learning analytics dashboard designed for individual student use not only renders the student into a document but also imbricates the student in a co-constitutive form of relationality with that document, which explicitly encourages and rewards a very particular form of action in the world in relation to the learning management system. I conclude that this has real-world effects not only in this inculcation, but in the reification of a particular neoliberal ideology of student engagement as a performance of observable, traceable, self-optimisation in a highly individualised educational worldview.

Revisiting Robert Pagès: Documents and Culture

An introduction to the life and work of Robert Pagès (1919–2007), French social psychology researcher and theorist of documentation. From 1946 to 1948 Pagès was a student in the program in documentation directed by Suzanne Briet that later became the Institut National des Techniques de Documentation (INTD). A 1947 thesis was published in 1948 as an article entitled “Transformations documentaires et milieu culturel” (Documentary transformations and cultural context). It received little attention until recently. The article, now reprinted and translated, examines the rise of new media and how they have largely displaced lived experience and bookish knowledge in a society that has become increasingly planned and coordinated. A notable feature of this article is his distinction between unique, particular objects, which he called “autodocuments,” and specimens that are representative of whatever group they are specimens of. A second thesis of classification was published in 1955 as Problèmes de classification culturelle et documentaire. Pagès founded and directed a laboratory for social psychology. He developed an indexing language (named CODOC) with interesting syntactic and notational characteristics for materials collected in the laboratory. Pagès writings and leftwing political activism are briefly noted.

The informative potential of bibliographic classification systems – reflections on a discussion in the French Documentation Movement

PurposeIn this article, the author discusses works from the French Documentation Movement in the 1940s and 1950s with regard to how it formulates bibliographic classification systems as documents. Significant writings by Suzanne Briet, Éric de Grolier and Robert Pagès are analyzed in the light of current document-theoretical concepts and discussions.Design/methodology/approachConceptual analysis.FindingsThe French Documentation Movement provided a rich intellectual environment in the late 1940s and early 1950s, resulting in original works on documents and the ways these may be represented bibliographically. These works display a variety of approaches from object-oriented description to notational concept-synthesis, and definitions of classification systems as isomorph documents at the center of politically informed critique of modern society.Originality/valueThe article brings together historical and conceptual elements in the analysis which have not previously been combined in Library and Information Science literature. In the analysis, the article discusses significant contributions to classification and document theory that hitherto have eluded attention from the wider international Library and Information Science research community. Through this, the article contributes to the currently ongoing conceptual discussion on documents and documentality.

“Living Document”: From Documents to Documentality, from Mimesis to Performative Indexicality

In this article, in distinction to documentation as an epistemic understanding of documents, I will discuss the epistemology of documentality as an indexical theory of documental functions, which I will develop through Bruno Latour’s notion of information. This notion of indexicality is different than Suzanne Briet’s notion of indexicality (which I have discussed elsewhere (Briet, 2006)). I will begin this paper with an historical problem that illustrates the issues of viewing documents as content representation. This is the problem identified by Vincent Debaene (Debaene, 2014) in early and mid-twentieth century French field anthropology of the “two book” phenomenon, which attempted to address a perceived epistemic distance between lived experience and its representation through scientific documents. The solution to this problem of presence and representation was the writing and publication by French anthroplogists of a second, more literary, document after the production of the scientific paper or book, which supposedly represented the experience of the anthropologist and the group under study more fully. I will argue that both texts, however, followed genre conventions and practices, which are neither more or less faithful to an original experience. I will argue that the notion of an original experience reflected in the content of the text misses the performatively indexical relationship of text to world and the role that this plays in scientific and other forms of documentality. In short, what Vincent Debaene identified as the French anthropologists’ quest for producing a “living documents,” which closes the gap between life and documental representation, is a Quixotic task, since the problem is not real but rather is a product of the epistemology of re-presentation, which forecloses from our understanding what really happens with scientific and other documents.

Emergence: Documents in Crisis

This essay suggests the etymologies of emergence, emergency, and crisis create a useful framework for theorizing documents. Indeed, the overlapping semantic associations of the words allow for the idea that documents emerge in crisis. The semantic overlap also allows a means for theorizing how documents descend into crisis. Theorizing documents in crisis, the essay argues, usefully complements documentalist theories of documentary representation suggested by thinkers like Paul Otlet and Suzanne Briet, as well newer conceptualizations of documentality as conceived by Michael Buckland and Maurizio Ferraris and documentarity as described by Ronald Day.

Introduction to Robert Pagès’ “Documentary Transformations and Cultural Context”

Robert Pagès (1919-2007) was an anarchist activist who later became director of a major social psychology research laboratory. Between these roles he was a student in documentation established in Paris by Suzanne Briet and others at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers. In 1947 while he was a student of documentation Pagès submitted a thesis entitled “Transformations documentaires et milieu culturel” (Documentary transformations and cultural context) which was published as an article in the Review of Documentation in 1948. A key theme was that documentation is to culture what machinery is to industry. This introduction situates and explains some key ideas from Pagès' article.

Ishi, Briet's Antelope, and the Documentality of Human Documents

Ishi, the “last wild Indian in North America,” was “discovered” in 1911 and spent the last years of his life living in an anthropology museum. There he was studied by anthropologists and viewed by the public as a living exhibit. In this paper, I take some initial steps in arguing that Ishi, the person, became a document to most people. The similarities between Ishi and Suzanne Briet’s hypothetical antelope, newly discovered and placed in a zoo, are eerie. Ishi, like the antelope, is brought into public knowledge as both an initial document and a wide variety of secondary documents derived from the original. Ishi, however, is also not a document, making the comparison to the antelope eerie. Bernd Frohmann’s concept of “documentality” helps us make sense of this fluctuation in Ishi’s status as a document. Ishi’s story, in turn, sheds light on the ethical implications of documentality for all humans.

Photography and Museums of Mutuality: A Metaphor

This article employs photography as a vehicle to explore museums and their increasing attempts to gain an open, discursive, democratic, and inclusive character. It suggests that drawing a parallel between photography and museums, at a time when globalizing technologies, aesthetics, and politics demand the radical redefinition of both, can provide a useful ground from which to examine the role of photography in the development of museums and vice versa, as well as notions of engagement, participation, and inclusion. In the last 150 years photography has performed a number of unique roles—evidentiary, artistic, commercial, and vernacular—that have all had a great impact on the history of representation, as well as the way in which photographs communicate inside museums (i.e., as artworks/artifacts, as evidence of objects and phenomena found outside the museum, as a record of objects contained in the museum, and as a marketing tool). All of these functions also have an impact on how photography is understood within and outside museums. However, within museums—this applies both to museums of art and other kinds of museums, including anthropological, archaeological, and history museums—photography was originally conceived and still operates predominately as a document; that is to say, as evidence of some kind, whether of an object, culture, or an artist’s work. The definition of a document is here taken from Suzanne Briet’s seminal 1951 work, What is Documentation.[1]

From Bibliography to Documentography

There is ambiguity in the use of the term bibliography for both the study of printed books and also for the listing of accessible intellectual resources. We address this ambiguity by examining two well-known anomalies: Donald F. Mckenzie’s assertion that bibliography should extend to all media, including culturally significant objects in the landscape and Suzanne Briet’s declaration that an antelope in a zoo is a document. This paper summarizes and extends an earlier, more detailed discussion (Buckland, 2018).

Documentation and Information Science: On Some Forgotten Origins of the French Contribution

PURPOSE/THESIS: This paper presents a review of the French contribution to the epistemology and theory of documentation and information science. It is focused on the authors, theories, and practices that have been neglected, or forgotten by French information specialists. An attempt was made to assess their contribution and influence on information science and the theory of the document. APPROACH/METHODS: The author focused on the analysis of the literature either printed or available as online texts, and proceedings of the ISKO-France conference held in Paris in 2017. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS: The review of the French contribution to the epistemology and theory of documentation and information science is carried out according to a triple chronological perspective. The first one goes back in time, as far as the contribution to the development of knowledge organization methods and theories of Enlightenment French philosophers’ and Gabriel Naudé. The second period covers relatively recent history, from the nineteenth to the twentieth century with the birth of the francophone document theoreticians such as the philosopher Auguste Comte and his Broad System of Ordering, and later Suzanne Briet’s view of a document as something (potentially anything) made into a document, offering the view that the word “document” should be used in a technical sense within information science to denote anything regarded as signifying something. The third period is represented by the thriving activities of what we call in France the forerunners among whom I have focused on the specific position of Eric De Grolier for his role in defining and expanding Ranganathan’s categories as well as that of Jean-Claude Gardin, their contribution and their impact on information science with a special focus on knowledge organization. ORIGINALITY/VALUE: The theme of the 4th International Scientific Conference on Information Science in the Age of Change: Innovative Information Services from which this paper is derived implies that speakers would give a state of the art on Innovative Information Service. However, I would like to suggest that talking about the European tradition of information science underpinning the innovation in information services would be worthwhile. It is because this tradition played a central role in developing the connection between modernism and information science, especially in relation to schemes for bibliography and documentation that emerged in the late 19th and early 20th century. The impact of the French tradition and its modernism in documentation and information theory is tremendous, but I chose only a few of these authors, mostly those understudied, because I find it surprising that there is so little reference to them in more recent work.

Você conhece Suzanne Briet?

Com base na constatação de que apesar de ignorada pelos pesquisadores franceses da área de Ciência da Informação até os anos 1990, Suzanne Briet já há muito tempo gozava de uma reputação considerável nos países anglo-saxões, especialmente nos Estados Unidos, o artigo busca resgatar a história de Suzanne Briet traçando sua trajetória profissional e pessoal. Para tanto, descreve a sua formação inicialmente em História e língua inglesa e em seguida a opção pelas bibliotecas, área onde ela teria atuação inovadora na Biblioteca Nacional da França. Descreve, ainda, a militância de Briet em favor da Documentação, bem como sua participação em associações internacionais da área. Elementos da biografia de Briet também são apresentados, desde sua origem familiar, religião, casamento e participação em associações de luta pelo reconhecimento do direito das mulheres até sua aposentadoria, aos sessenta anos, quando ela se dedica à crítica literária. Analisa o impacto do conceito de documento na perspectiva apresentada no livro Qu’est-ce que la Documentation? Conclui que a obra de Suzanne Briet ainda não foi inteiramente conhecida e incita os pesquisadores a ficarem atentos às possibilidades de novas descobertas a partir dos seus arquivos encontrados na cidade dos antepassados de Briet.

Qu’est-ce qu’un texte numérique?—A new rationale for the digital representation of text

In this article we aim to provide a minimally sufficient theoretical framework to argue that it is time for a re-conception of the notion of text in the field of digital textual scholarship. This should allow us to reconsider the ontological status of digital text, and that will ground future work discussing the specific analytical affordances offered by digital texts understood as digital texts. Following from the argument of Suzanne Briet regarding documentation, referring to Eco’s understanding of ‘infinite semiosis’, and accounting for the reciprocal effects between carrier technology and meaning observed by McLuhan, we argue that the functions of document and text are realized primarily by their fluid nature and by the dynamic character of their interpretation. To define the purpose of textual scholarship as a ‘stabilisation’ of text is therefore fallacious. The delusive focus on ‘stability’ and discrete ‘philological fact’ gives rise to a widespread belief in textual scholarship that digital texts can be treated simply as representations of print or manuscript texts. On the contrary—digital texts are texts in and of themselves in numerous digital models and data structures which may include, but is not limited to, text meant for graphical display on a screen. We conclude with the observation that philological treatment of these texts demands an adequate digital and/or computational literacy.

O conceito de documento em abordagem bibliográfica segundo as disciplinas constituintes do campo

Bibliografia, Biblioteconomia, Documentação e Ciência da Informação apresentam, cada uma a seu modo, e influenciando-se uma à outra, o campo que tem por objeto a mediação documentária em abordagem bibliográfica. Na perspectiva de vertentes constituintes do campo, estas disciplinas permitem um conceito de documento no sentido de objeto empírico sobre o qual recaem os procedimentos. O objetivo é tratar da construção do conceito de documento por meio das disciplinas cujas contribuições convergem para o campo das ações de mediação documentária em abordagem bibliográfica. Como metodologia, recorreu-se à exploração de literatura que discute o documento pelas disciplinas citadas, buscando estabelecer equivalências e realizar contrapontos. O primeiro tópico apresenta uma construção histórica do conceito de documento em Documentação, durante o século XX, em especial, em solo francês, desde sua concepção por Paul Otlet, depois por Suzanne Briet, e posteriormente por Jean Meyriat; o segundo tópico perpassa as disciplinas Bibliografia, Biblioteconomia e Documentação, em torno do conceito de documento em perspectiva empírica ou científica, e a Ciência da Informação no que tange aos aspectos que herda das disciplinas que a precederam; e o terceiro tópico busca aprofundar o conceito de documento, em abordagem bibliográfica, estabelecendo algumas relações com ideias propostas para este conceito em abordagem arquivística e museológica. Conclui que predomina abordagem bibliográfica sobre documento que enfatiza a instância tipológica do objeto e normatizadora de sua descrição, menos que aquela baseada no caráter simbólico dos procedimentos e de seu produto final.

All that is the case: documents and indexicality

Three alternative epistemologies of documentation are discussed, starting from the Otletian conception, following with Suzanne Briet´s reframing, and finishing with the neo-documentalism of Michael Buckland. Regarding the theoretical plane, Wittgenstein’s language games and Buckland’s perspective on documentation are brought one in front of the other. The main objective is to discuss the problems of significance and meaning, drawing on the concepts of indexical presence and absence. Some photographs of the late Professor Eduardo Murguia are taken as an example and reference. The author comes to the conclusion that documents can be characterized not necessarily as evidence or proof, but as an index, which can reveal both what is present and what is absent in the documentary record.

A Documentologic Approach of Herbarium: Documentary Anabiosis and Philogenetic Classification

The Francophone school of the document specify the important role of the user to qualified an object as document. Following the work of Paul Otlet and Suzanne Briet, Jean Meyriat have proposed a division between document by intention and document by attribution. These research are part of the development of the document science called Documentology. In this line and taking model on Botany the research presented here examines the herbaria as textual, iconic and physical documents in an evolutionary perspective. It defines the document dormancy as a latent state and documentary anabiosis as activation of objects that become documents. Botany model is fruitful for the Documentology progress. It invites us to develop a documentologic approach of sciences.

An Afterword to Indexing It All: The Subject in the Age of Documentation, Information, and Data

EDITOR'S SUMMARYFor his book Indexing It All: The Subject in the Age of Documentation, Information, and Data, Ronald E. Day was honored with the 2015 ASIS&T Best Information Science Book award. In this afterword, Day explains that the book examines the concept of “aboutness” in the modern documentary tradition covering information science and data science. In writing the book, Day wanted to sort out the relationship between subject and object, between user and document, the core of information science and prelude to information retrieval. He considers the transition of a text serving a group audience to a document serving individual user needs, facilitated by an array of digital technologies. Referencing historical precursors Paul Otlet and Suzanne Briet, he considers documentation as evidence that, depending on the viewpoint chosen, may be a construction or a representation of a concept. Day considers his book a dystopian work, asserting that information technology has been charged with answering both information and cultural needs and has given rise to users’ addiction to technology. He anticipates data and documents to both influence and be influenced by evolving technologies, cultural forms and social norms with the document form persisting, though transformed.

Cataloging Medieval Manuscripts, from Beasts to Bytes

This article investigates the history of cataloging medieval manuscripts in order to determine a paradigm for digital catalogs of the present. Inspired by the work of Suzanne Briet (1894–1989), it argues in favor of a culturally informed “documentation” that considers not only the complexity of medieval manuscripts as information objects, but also anticipates the diverse interests of users who depend on digital images and supporting metadata to access manuscripts as primary sources for research. Presented here is a faceted metadata structure that considers the premodern manuscript as physical, textual, historical, as well as digital information. This approach is built upon various traditions for cataloging medieval manuscripts, from Cassiodorus in the sixth century to the electronic databases and digital catalogs of the present.

Indexing it all: the subject in the age of documentation, information, and data

In this book, Ronald Day offers a critical history of modern tradition of documentation. Focusing on documentary index (understood as a mode of social positioning), and drawing on work of French documentalist Suzanne Briet, Day explores understanding and uses of indexicality. He examines transition as indexes went from being explicit professional structures that mediated users and documents to being implicit infrastructural devices used in everyday information and communication acts. Doing so, he also traces three epistemic eras in representation of individuals and groups, first in forms of documents, then information, then data. Day investigates five cases from modern tradition of documentation. He considers socio-technical instrumentalism of Paul Otlet, the father of European (contrasting it to hermeneutic perspective of Martin Heidegger); shift from documentation to information science and accompanying transformation of persons and texts into users and information; social media's use of algorithms, further subsuming persons and texts; attempts to build android robots -- to embody human agency within an information system that resembles a human being; and social big data as a technique of neoliberal governance that employs indexing and analytics for purposes of surveillance. Finally, Day considers status of critique and judgment at a time when people and their rights of judgment are increasingly mediated, displaced, and replaced by modern documentary techniques.

Documentality Beyond Documents

The question What is a document? received increased attention during the 1990s with a revival of interest in the ideas of Paul Otlet (1934) and Suzanne Briet (1951) and in arguments to the effect that any physical object might, in the right context, be regarded as evidence of something and, therefore, could be considered to be a document.1 The Oxford English Dictionary reveals that, in the past, was used for oral communications, lessons, warnings, and, more generally, whatever is concerned with evidence or had an instructive effect. There has been some acceptance of this extended use of but also questions concerning the role of intentionality and some rejection.2Buckland (1991b) addressed the multiplicity of uses of the word information by suggesting that most of them could be sorted into three categories:* Information-as-knowledge, meaning the knowledge imparted through communication;* Information-as-process, the process of becoming informed;* Information-as-thing, denoting bits, bytes, books, and other physical media.The third category, the most prevalent use of the word information, includes any material thing or presentation (such as a radio announcement or television documentary) perceived as instructive. In this third sense, 'information' becomes a synonym for a broad view of 'document.'3Against this background, three major views of can be identified:1. The conventional, material view. This sees documents as graphic records, usually of textual form, inscribed or displayed on a flat surface (clay tablet, paper, microfilm, computer screen) that are material, local, and, generally, transportable. These objects are made as The limits of inclusion are unclear. Some have argued, for example, for the inclusion of terrestrial globes and of sculptures under this heading.2. An instrumental view. On this view almost anything can be made to serve as a document, to signify something, to be held up as constituting evidence of some sort. Models, educational toys, natural history collections, and archaeological traces can be considered in this category. Before the adoption of military uniforms, it was hard for a soldier in battle to know who was friend and who was enemy. In a sixth-century battle between Welsh and Saxons, fought in a field of leeks, Saint David instructed the Welsh to indicate their identity to each other by wearing a leek as an emblem. The leek documented Welsh identity by providing a code to those who understood it and remains a national emblem of Wales. In modem English it would seem a stretch to refer to these leeks as documents. Nevertheless, in conveying a message in much the same way that textual labels would have, they performed as if they were documents.Briet's classic discussion of documentality in her manifesto Qu'est-ce que la documentation? famously asserted that a specimen of a newly discovered species of antelope, when positioned in a taxonomy and in a cage, was made to serve as a document (Briet 1951). This view follows from her assertion that bibliography and documentation are properly considered to be concerned with access to evidence and not just with records. Briet focuses on objects made into documents or made to serve as documents.3. A semiotic view. The two previous views emphasize the creation of documents and imply intentionality. Yet both are inadequate on a semiotic view in which anything could be considered as a document if it is regarded as evidence of something regardless of what its creator (if any) intended (if anything). This third view includes cases in which, unlike (2) and (3), there is no creative intent, including natural signs.These three viewsmade as, made into, and considered as-are progressively more inclusive.The semiotic view is also significant because it calls into question definitions of documents as social objects (as in Ferraris [2013]). …

The Continuing Relevance of Paul Otlet, the International Institute of Bibliography/International Federation for Documentation, and the Documentation Movement for Information Science and Studies

This article discusses the historical legacy and present-day impact of Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine, two of the earliest pioneers of the documentation movement, and the organization they founded in 1895, known originally as the International Institute for Bibliography (IIB), later as the International Federation for Documentation (FID). Otlet, La Fontaine, and the FID are remembered for their bold, positivist vision of creating a complete, accurate, objective master database of all human knowledge in the pre-computer era—a vision partially expressed in the Mundaneum, a massive collection of hard-copy data assembled in their home country of Belgium in the early twentieth century. Predictably, this ambitious project failed. Yet, as this paper explains, Otlet, La Fontaine, and their organization nevertheless had a lasting and significant impact on the evolution of modern information science, identifying both goals and problems for later information theorists that remain relevant even in the digital age. Their prewar documentalist movement, inquiring into the fundamental nature of documents and of information, paved the way for the work of postwar documentalists including Suzanne Briet and S. R. Rangathan, among others; in turn, the work of the postwar documentalists overlaps with and impacted the rise of computer-based information theory and science and the dawn of the digital age from the 1950s onward. The FID itself persisted as an active organization into the 1990s, convening conferences, publishing books, and generally promoting international bibliographic research and standardization as well as international scholarly cooperation—which relates to the wider legacy of Otlet and La Fontaine as early pioneers of international peace, trans-national institutional cooperation, and global pooling of information to confront human problems. Their activities were direct precursors of, for instance, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Even as to their positivist presumptions which ultimately led to failure, the example of Otlet and La Fontaine remain relevant—for humans generally, and scientists, social scientists, and other professionals in particular, remain all too prone to positivistic fallacies of perfect and objective knowledge, notwithstanding the warnings against such presumptions from postmodernism.