2020 Annual Meeting^

Program and Abstracts

Documentary Monstrosities^

Hosted by:
Faculty of Information & Media Studies, University of Western Ontario
London, Ontario, Canada
August 6, 2020

Program and Abstracts^

Welcome to DOCAM, in what we can truly call a monstrous year: a time of unexpected and terrifying transformations.

Because we cannot meet in person, we are changing up the routine of DOCAM this year. Here’s how it will work:

The meeting will take place on Thursday, August 6, using Zoom. The accepted abstracts are available in the document linked, grouped into four themes. There will be four online discussion sessions, one for each theme. Each discussion will have a Chair to moderate the discussion.

No papers will be presented; instead, the Chair will pose a series of questions for discussions, questions that pertain to the theme and the abstracts related to that theme. In addition, we will also have a student monitoring the session and keeping track of the response list.

You are free to attend any and all themed discussions. However, we do ask that you read the abstracts related to the discussions you plan to attend.

Program and Abstracts

Call for Proposals^

For centuries, monsters have dominated our imaginative lives: figures of terror that exist at the intersection of fixity and change. Sometimes, the monstrous appears as a transformation, in which something or someone familiar “turns” into something else: perhaps a serpent, a vampire, or a ghost. At other times, the monstrous manifests itself as a false state of fixity, as in the seeming changelessness of figures like Dorian Gray.

Documents also exist at this intersection of fixity and change, and evoke similarly complex cultural responses: the problematic triumph of typographical fixity over scribal drift, and the equally problematic emergence of digital metamorphosis against the backdrop of print culture.

The Document Academy welcomes completed research, research in progress, general conceptual and theoretical work, projects and case studies, creative and practical work in areas of document theory, document analysis and document materiality relevant to the conference theme in the following formats:

Such explorations may involve, but are not confined to, the following sub-themes:

As in the past, papers, art works and posters may address:

Schedule^

The conference is tentatively scheduled to begin with a reception on Wednesday evening, August 5, and to continue with presentations and discussions from 9 a.m. on Thursday, August 6, to 6:00 p.m. on Friday, August 7. To preserve the atmosphere of open-ended discussion of previous DOCAM conferences, DOCAM'20 will feature only plenary sessions, together with scheduled opportunities for conversation sessions and viewing the posters and art works.

Submission Instructions^

Submission deadline for proposals: March 31, 2020 (extended from original deadline of March 17). Receipt will be confirmed within one week; decisions will be announced by 6 April 2020.

Please submit proposals for papers, artwork and posters to Dr. Grant Campbell at the Faculty of Information & Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario: gcampbel@uwo.ca. Please include "DOCAM 2020" in the subject line of all correspondence, including proposal and paper submissions.

The file formats for proposals are RTF, MS Word, or PDF.

All proposals should include:

Paper, poster and art work proposals should also include:

Conference language is English.

For more information contact the chair of DOCAM’20:

D. Grant Campbell, Associate Professor
Faculty of Information & Media Studies
The University of Western Ontario
London, ON N6A 5B7
Canada
email: gcampbel@uwo.ca

Published Proceedings^

Should you wish to participate, we will be publishing the presentations in the Proceedings from the Document Academy, which publishes 1-2 issues a year as a record of the activities of the Document Academy, including Board-reviewed conference proceedings and peer-reviewed special issues.

Submitted papers will be peer-reviewed, and the proceedings will be published in December 2020. Details on submission instructions to come.

About DOCAM^

DOCAM'20 is the annual meeting of the Document Academy, an international network of scholars, artists and professionals in various fields, who are interested in the exploration of the concept of the document as a resource for scholarly, artistic, and professional work.

The aim of The Document Academy is to foster a multi-disciplinary space for experimental and critical research on the document in the widest sense, drawing on scholarship, traditions and experiences from the arts and humanities, social sciences, education, and from such diverse fields as information, media, museum, archival, cultural, and science studies.

The Document Academy originated as a co-sponsored effort by the Program of Documentation Studies, University of Tromsø, Norway, and the School of Information, University of California, Berkeley. Since then, it has convened in various locations across the globe, from Australia to France. The 2020 conference is hosted by the Faculty of Information & Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario, Canada.