Niels Winfeld Lund, "Document, text and medium: concepts, theories and disciplines",
in: Journal of Documentation. Vol. 66, No. 5 (2010), 734-749
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is first to provide a critical conceptual discussion
of different use of the notion of text, especially in the case of expressions including
words as well as images, second to consider the notion of document as an alternative to
the notion of text, and finally to lay out a theoretical ground for a broad discipline of
documentation studies.
Design/methodology/approach – The approach took the form of a conceptual analysis
of a number of works in media and literary studies.
Findings – There were found a number of cases of contradictory use of the notion of
text within the same work, talking about text in a broad overall sense covering all media
as well as text as a distinctive concept separating words from images, while it was found
through a conceptual history of the notion of document that the latter notion not only
covers a written paper, but multiple media.
Research limitations/implications – In future research, one should consider the use of
document as the concept for the expressions as a whole and dedicate the notion of text
solely for the verbal part of the expressions and make more empirical analysis within
this conceptual framework to see if it makes a difference in practice to change the
overall concept from text to document.
Practical implications – Having a broad concept of document, it would be possible to
be more flexible regarding the choose of proper media for documentation.
Originality/value – By making a critique of the notion of text and suggesting a broader
concept of document as well as documentation, the paper provides a ground for
reconsidering the classical disciplinary structure, divided into humanities as well as the
information sciences and social sciences.
Keywords Text retrieval, Document handling, Multimedia
Paper type Conceptual paper