Using Documents

Using Documents presents an interdisciplinary theoretical discussion of human communication with documents in and after the "Gutenberg galaxy." Interdisciplinarity is taken seriously: looking back on existing work, texts on written communication by the philosopher and sociologist Georg Simmel and by an interdisciplinary French group of authors under the pseudonym Roger T. Pédauque are taken as a starting point and presented afresh (in part for the first time for an English-speaking audience). A look ahead to the future is attempted in contributions from an-again interdisciplinary-group of cultural scientists and cultural technologists who gathered at the University of Wuppertal in October 2019. Whereas the modeling (including technical modeling) of documents has to date largely been limited to the description of output forms and specific content, the foundations are laid here for including documents' contexts of use in models that are grounded in cultural theory. In this way, a hitherto largely unexplored intersection between media science and media technology is also investigated.