Volume 3, Issue 2 (2016) Proceedings from the 13th Annual Meeting of the Document Academy

Thoughts on the 2016 DOCAM Proceedings

Brian C. O'Connor

DOCAM is the precious embodiment of a years-long conversation. In the age of Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter there is little need for getting together in a physical space to trade papers. DOCAM provides an affordance for the mix of ideas, modalities, and personalities of a good conversation. Intriguing ideas, questions, and observations seed the conversation each year. As in any good conversation, some presentations have been fully formed, some presented as “what do you think?” pieces, and some modified on the fly. The memories, the published papers, the thoughts that pop up in a lecture, the proceedings, and the dissertations that have been generated and those yet to come all form a biography of the DOCAM conversation.

This year we used a different approach to seeding the conversation - a “speed dating” format in which each presenter had 20 minutes in which to present ideas and to entertain questions. Together with the conversational intent of DOCAM, this meant that most of the presentations were not mere readings of fully formed papers. This is as we expected; however, it does pose an intriguing problem for proceedings – what do we publish in the proceedings?

For many of the presenters there was a paper nearly finished at the foundation of the presentation; for many there were some PowerPoint slides and some notes. On the one hand, to represent what happened at the gathering we could easily argue that notes and slides are entirely appropriate; on the other hand, presenting such notes without the greater context of the gathering and the history of gatherings would be a representation of only limited usefulness. We have asked each presenter to provide a re-working of their presentation, while at the same time not requiring more formalisms or more conclusions than warranted by the original presentation and attendant conversations.

DOCAM has thrived on casual rigorous conversations. We present these pieces to spur more such conversation by those who were able to attend, as well as those coming to DOCAM through these pages.

We thank the Department of Information Science in the College of Information at the University of North Texas, chaired by Dr. Suliman Hawamdeh, for hosting DOCAM 2016.