Volume 8, Issue 2 (2021) Proceedings from the 2021 Annual Meeting of the Document Academy

PDOCAM'21 Introduction

A few years ago, as yet another DOCAM conference came to its end, a discussion emerged on whether to start meeting biannually instead of every year. I don’t think anyone in the room actually wanted that but still, for most there are more conferences to attend than there is time and funding to get to them. At the end of the discussion however, an agreement was made to keep up the annual meetings of the Document Academy.

During these last two years, this arrangement has been challenged from a very different perspective. The Covid pandemic that forced last year’s conference online is still with us, and with it the need to reconsider the very nature of scholarly community engagement. Grant Campbell and his colleagues at University of Western Ontario set a wonderful example of how to arrange DOCAM in a new way, and for this year’s conference at Linnaeus University, we tried our best to live up to that example.

The conference took place on Zoom in August 2021, and as presentations and discussions proceeded it proved to have a sense of urgency.

The theme of this year’s conference was more obvious than for perhaps any previous DOCAM meeting: Emergence: Documents in Crisis. The ongoing global health crisis has prompted immediate response from the scholarly community, from medicine to the humanities, and the need to address it from a variety of perspectives is important for Document Studies as well. Results from such efforts were seen at both the annual meeting and in this issue of the Proceedings from the Document Academy. Topics gather around aspects of documentation in crises related to Covid, climate change, and social conflict. There were, among others, papers on Covid signage in Malta, storm analysis in the USA, folkloristic tsunami warning systems in Indonesia, the branding of books as essential for society during crises in France, the social and documentary properties of the Covid passport, and the role of libraries in handling the pandemic in Norway.

This issue of the Proceedings also contains more theoretical themes, and analyses of the role and importance of documents and documentation processes in historical and institutional contexts. Most of all perhaps, this issue presents a field of research brimming with life and creativity.

Document Studies continues to develop both in terms of theory development and social significance, not least through the annual meetings of the Document Academy.

Joacim Hansson
2021 DOCAM Chair