document

"But what is a document? Bibliographers and other information specialists have persisted in puzzling over this question for at least the last hundred years. Most famously, the French librarian and 'documentalist' Suzanne Briet proposed in 1951 that an antelope running wild would not be a document, but an antelope taken into a zoo would be one, presumably because it would then be framed—or reframed—as an example, specimen, or instance*." Gitelman, Lisa, Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents, Duke university press, 2014, p. 2.

*Briet was a proponent of the European bibliographical movement called Documentation. See Suzanne Briet, What Is Documentation? English Translation of the Classic French Text, trans. Ronald E. Day, Laurent Martinet, and Hermina G. B. Anghelescu (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2006). See also Bernd Frohmann, “ e Documentality of Mme. Briet’s Antelope,” in Communication Matters: Material- ist Approaches to Media, Mobility, and Networks, ed. Jeremy Packer and Stephen B. Cro s Wiley (New York: Routledge, 2012), 173–82.