Information Access Seminar
A New Theory of Documentation for Information Studies
Friday, April 11, 2008
3:00 pm to 5:00 pm
Bernd Frohmann, University of Western Ontario
Documents have recently returned from their marginalized position in information studies and in several other areas of the social sciences. In this seminar I plan to give an overview of some of the topics I'm pursuing in a grant-funded research project with the above title. I'll identify some of the theoretical concepts that I have found useful for thinking about documentation, extracted from Wittgenstein, Latour, Foucault, and Deleuze. Examples are documentary agency, authorless statements, assemblages, and documentality. If time permits, I'll introduce some current work on the documentality of the human body.
Bernd Frohmann is a Visiting Scholar in the School of Information for the Spring 2008 semester. He is the author of Deflating Information: From Science Studies to Documentation (University of Toronto Press, 2004), which draws heavily on social practices of science literature to re-theorize approaches to library, information, and documentation studies. This talk extends the ideas from that book.