Monthly Archives: July 2018

A self-portraiture workshop: Documenting, exploring and healing

by Tim Gorichanaz Document, Experience

I’ve written recently on self-documentation, selfhood and freedom, and how art can help people cultivate moral knowledge. In my doctoral dissertation, I explored these topics in the context of artistic self-portraiture.

I settled on self-portraiture because I was looking for a personally meaningful, nonverbal form of document to bring information science theory forward. As it happens, the practice of self-portraiture has long been recognized and used for self-exploration, self-discovery, self-understanding, self-creation and self-care, as discussed variously in art history, art therapy, occupational therapy and other fields. When this is understood in the context of our current mental health crisis (increased depression, anxiety, suicide, and on and on) the practice of self-portraiture may be particularly useful—and urgent. In brief, I think many of our ills stem from a sense of meaninglessness, and so I understand our task to be a matter of rediscovering and cultivating personal meaning.

In this regard, the stories of self-portraiture that came out of my doctoral research were so powerful that I want to find ways to enable others to have such experiences. Self-portraiture is something that everyone can do. It’s a matter of engaging with an ancient technology, which sometimes in our high-tech world we forget that we have at our disposal.

This week I was blessed to host, under the auspices of the College of Computing & Informatics at Drexel University (i.e., my college), a closing reception for the art exhibition that came out of my dissertation.

I started with a few words about my project. Justin Tyner then spoke on his experience making his stained-glass self-portrait—which he summed up, poignantly, with a poem by Nanao Sakaki:

Look! A mountain there
I don’t climb a mountain
Mountain climbs me
Mountain is myself
I climb on myself

After that, I invited attendees to create their own self-portraits. The experience began with a short personal exploration worksheet, and then attendees had at a table full of art supplies for more than an hour. Finally, Emily Addis, another of the artists in my study, led the group in a discussion and debrief.

Attendees were invited to sum up their experiences in a word. We heard: tragic, celebration, collaboration, introspection, confusion, calming, and no-self. Many learned new things about themselves. Some people shared these with the group, and others simply said, “Thank you.”

Try it for yourself. Find the worksheet here, and get started!

Three Perfections: A Metaphor for Document Theory

by Tim Gorichanaz Document

Metaphors are a means through which human thought is structured. Indeed, recent work in cognitive science suggests that all human thought proceeds through metaphor. As such, it is unsurprising that metaphor has been an important part of the rhetorician’s toolkit since Aristotle. I contend that, to see the importance of documentation studies in modern life, we can employ metaphor.

A quick definition: “Metaphor” comes from the Greek meaning “to transfer.” Commensurately, metaphor brings an expression or concept from one domain to another in order to render something in the target domain more understandable.

The concept of “Three Perfections” comes from China, but its influence is found throughout East Asia. This image is based on a 1955 design by Ryuichi Yamashiro, titled “Forest.”

The metaphor I want to discuss is the concept of the “three perfections” from pre-modern China. For much of China’s history, the art of calligraphy was considered an elite intellectual and artistic achievement. Poetry and painting were also practiced, but largely in isolation. In the Tang Dynasty (618–907 A.D.), poets, calligraphers and painters began collaborating on works. These three pursuits became entangled, and even circularly defined: Painting was regarded as silent poetry, poetry was regarded as the painting of sound or the voice of thought, and calligraphy was regarded as the exteriorization of thought—three perfections. With any one of the three missing, a piece was considered incomplete, imperfect.

Philosophically, the three perfections embody the virtue expressed in the Tao Te Ching to “return to the simplicity of the uncarved block.” Considered in the modern Western context, this conceptualization challenges our penchant for separating mind and body and constructing other dualisms.

I suggest that the document, as conceptualized in neo-documentation studies, embodies the three perfections. Documents are physical (viz. painting), they are manifestations of human thought (viz. calligraphy), and they engage social discourse (viz. poetry). (Granted, in practice the three cannot be disentangled so cleanly.) Moreover, the image of the three perfections encourages us to reflect on the many hands that go into creating any single document.

We are familiar with Lund’s tripartite conceptualization of documents as physical, mental and social (cf. Buckland’s technological, meaningful and sociocultural). (As an aside, it’s worth noting that this conceptualization was developed using a metaphor from physics.) The three perfections present an alternative, but somewhat synergistic, view: We are invited to attempt to map each of the three perfections onto Lund’s three concepts, which is an opportunity for self-reflection within our field.

The concept of the three perfections can help us better understand how and why the document perspective is indispensable today. For example, we can consider the recent phenomenon of fake news. Those who create fake news exploit the modern disregard for the material aspects of the news, which has become possible from the widespread application of data/computing metaphors to documents in the modern day. As philosopher of information technology Michael Heim wrote in the 1980s: “In the psychic framework of word processing, text is increasingly experienced as data.” Those who unwittingly spread fake news have fallen prey to this situation.

Perhaps we can fight metaphors with metaphors.

The document perspective encourages use to take a holistic view on the world. To date, this discourse has been taking place in a small corner of the academic community. Using metaphor to emphasize the reality of the three perfections (which could be considered an expansion of WJT Mitchell’s concept of imagetext) will make the document perspective more accessible to all, and it may help us overcome these societal issues. In a simple way, it promotes basic literacy for today’s online citizenry. It may dash our boundaries and heal divisions—but at the very least, we’ll see the world as a more complete place.

Documents and Moral Knowledge

by Tim Gorichanaz Document, Sociopolitical issues

I’ve finally finished my PhD work, and I can rededicate myself to blogging (more) regularly and taking ScratchTap in new directions. This fall, I’ll be presenting a paper on documents and moral knowledge at the Annual Meeting of the Document Academy. Here’s a snippet of what I’m thinking about.

Documents have traditionally been conceptualized as representations of reality. As such, we know a lot about how they show and afford facts about the world. Recently, scholars have been exploring how documents can also construct reality. With this view, we can begin to think about how documents show and afford moral knowledge, or knowledge about what people ought to value in the world and how people ought to act. In this realm, much of the discussion centers around texts, such as works of fiction. Reading Crime and Punishment, for example, is a great way to build your moral imagination.

But what about visual art? I’d like to consider two works of art depicting Yellowstone National Park, one from the 19th century and another from the 21st. By analyzing these works as documents, we can see how art played and continues to play a decisive role in how Americans conceptualize and value the wilderness—perhaps even more than scientific documents.

The first document is a painting done in 1871 by Thomas Moran depicting the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. The work was done while Moran was a guest artist on a geographic survey. Moran’s work showed the beauty and scale of the Yellowstone region more effectively than other descriptions, such that Moran’s work was decisive in the United States passing the National Parks Act in 1872, forming Yellowstone National Park and setting the stage for other regions in the United States—and other countries—to be preserved as national parks.

The second document is a 2014 photograph by Michael Nichols, depicting three bison at Yellowstone National Park being photographed by a group of people near their automobiles. Nichols’ work was part of a National Geographic project documenting Yellowstone National Park which sought to expose the tension between the park’s existence as a wildlife preserve and a site for human enjoyment.

Both of these works respond to a dualism in the human relationship to the wilderness, dating back at least to the European colonization of America. On one hand, (1) we see the wilderness as a store of commodities to be profited from; and on the other, (2) we see the wilderness as a dangerous, chaotic blur that defies comprehension. Thus the U.S. National Parks are at once “for the benefit and enjoyment of the people,” and also a preserve of nature and wildlife for its own sake.

In their artworks, both Moran and Nichols seem to reject (1), but they do so in different ways: Moran does so by depicting (2), while Nichols does so by holding up a mirror to (1).
If we think of the purpose of these documents as providing moral knowledge, we can ask which approach is more effective. Moran’s work had the almost immediate effect of the creation of the U.S. National Parks. Nichols’ work cannot yet boast any such effects. Of course, many other factors complicate this picture: today’s media climate, the saturation of images, the nature of internet communication…

Still, the question should give us pause. The wilderness is disappearing, if it has not already gone. Indeed, the world itself is in grave danger, as climate change unfurls. In discourse around these topics, we have tended to appeal to scientific documents. But if artistic documents can provision the sort of moral knowledge necessary to heal our relationship to the world, then perhaps we can also appeal to art. If that is the case, then it is worth thinking about what sort of art will serve best.