Gerald Hartung

Karl-Heinrich Schmidt

Frederik Schlupkothen

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.

A Multidisciplinary Approach to Document Theory

Using Documents

John Bateman

This book presents a new basis for the empirical analysis of film. Starting from an established body of work in film theory, the authors show how a close incorporation of the current state of the art in multimodal theory—including accounts of the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes of organisation, discourse semantics and advanced ‘layout structure’—builds a methodology by which concrete details of film sequences drive mechanisms for constructing filmic discourse structures. The book introduces the necessary background, the open questions raised, and the method by which analysis can proceed step-by-step. Extensive examples are given from a broad range of films. With this new analytic tool set, the reader will approach the study of film organisation with new levels of detail and probe more deeply into the fundamental question of the discipline: just how is it that films reliably communicate meaning?

Karl-Heinrich Schmidt

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