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INFOSYS 296A: Document Theory

Spring 2006

Course Description

The course will be an introduction to document theory, attempting to bridge social, cognitive and technical perspectives of human interaction and offering a conceptual framework for analysis of the ways media are being used when we interact with each other. If you consider documentation as one dimension of human interaction complementary to communication and information, you may argue that we are documenting all the time, when we interact with our environment making documents like emails, letters, reports, photos, video, homepages, speeches, using different media in different ways, etc.

The course will be organized partly as a comparative discussion of my document theory in relation to other general theories like communication and information models (Shannon & Weaver, McLuhan, Innis, Peirce etc.), and partly as a demonstration of possible applications in the fields of arts, sciences, health care and subcultures.

It will be possible to get either 2 or 3 units for this course. To get 2 units, students should present a small paper on one of the theoretical aspects or one of the empirical cases. In the 3 units case, students are invited to explore the relevance and possible problems of applying the theory in fields and cases of their own choice.