#information science

6/100 days of productivity (interrupted)

I found out a thing yesterday that's making me so very very very excited

And just in case you're the type who'd get excited too and like me two days ago you also don't know this important fact:

The Organization for @transformativeworks (OTW; the parent org of AO3) publishes a peer-reviewed academic journal, completely open-access, i.e. free for you to read

Cancel all my appointments forever this is where I'm going to be for the foreseeable lifetime gfasdafdhfgadgd

This post brought to you by "beardo needs to write a literature review about a certain number of a certain type of peer-reviewed paper, on otherwise whatever topics he likes, vaguely contained inside the concept of of 'library or information services', and yesterday he Found His Topic"

I'm so happy everyone, I'm going to write so many academic papers about fanfiction my lecturers are going to get sick of me 🥹🤩

I am Aziraphale rn

michael buckland (1997) and suzanne briet (1951) have said these things much better than i am currently able to, but the basic chain of arguments is this:

when considering what a document is, it is pretty much impossible to draw a logically sound line between documents and non-documents simply based on their medium. the digital concept of documents is much more pervasive now, but even just in the physical realm (as was the only/main focus of documentation and information science when those two papers were published) you can't really make a hard cut based on anything but personal feelings.

while the most typical form of a physical document would be text on paper, diagrams, maps, and similar things are also definitely within that category. and if maps count, so would, logically, maps that have three dimensions, as well as globes (since globes are, in the end, just spherical maps). from there on, we look at other types of models: on what grounds would we exclude them if me are already including one type? and since, in the end, the only truly accurate model is the real thing, it gets pretty hard to exclude anything simply based on its shape. which led to the consideration of why we consider something a document. the answer buckland finds is that the relevant trait of a document is that it is an informative object, fixated in a way that make its informative traits accessible. thus any object's status as a document or non-document becomes situational: a book, consulted for its contents, certainly is a document; a book used as a doorstopper much less so (unless of course, you are in a situation where the book as a doorstopper becomes once more informative, such as looking for clues on the owner's personality). or, to get b'ck to the antilope: an antilope simply existing in its natural habitat does not really have the traits of a document, an antilope at the zoo, however, is there to inform the visitors of certain things: for example "what does an antilope look like", or "how does it move about", which in the end lead to it technically qualifying as a document.

(in the end, the question of "what do we store as a document" is usually answered by examining how universal the informative traits are. in the end, storing something for its informative qualities that is only informative to a single person on earth would not really be in the spirit of a system designed to store information.)

🖇️ 07.03.2026

Coffman navigates over to the Wikipedia article about one of the conspirators—Arthur Nebe, a high-ranking member of the SS. Apart from his role in the plot, Nebe’s main claim to notability is that he came up with the idea of turning vans into mobile gas chambers by piping in exhaust fumes. The article acknowledges both of these facts, along with the detail that Nebe tested his system on the mentally ill. But it also says that he worked to “reduce the atrocities committed,” going so far as to give his bloodthirsty superiors inflated death totals. Coffman will recall that she feels “totally disoriented.” She cannot believe that an innovator in mass murder would have tried to protect the Jews and other supposed subhumans his troops rounded up. She checks the footnotes. The claim is attributed to War of Extermination, a compendium of academic essays originally published in 1995. Coffman knows the book is legit, because she happens to have a copy on loan from the library. When she goes to the cited page, she finds a paragraph that appears to confirm all the Wikipedia article’s wild claims. But then she reads the first sentence of the next paragraph: “This is, of course, nonsense.” The level of bad faith is eye-opening for Coffman. She is “very appalled.” She sees that her confidence in Wikipedia was “very much misplaced.” All it takes to warp historical memory, she realizes, is something this small, achievable for almost anyone with a keyboard. “So few people can have so much impact, it’s a little scary,” she says. She begins to turn a more critical eye to what she sees on Wikipedia. Especially the footnotes.

Emphasis is my own, because it's just so important.

Exercise a healthy skepticism for everything you read.

This goes for any kind of research, not just in Wikipedia. This happens in all kinds of contexts, purposeful or not.

Look at works cited, look at the original source. Make sure you understand the context of whatever you're looking at, be it a photo, a quote, or excerpt.

It may sound laborious, but honestly like anything else, the more you practice the easier it gets. For places like wikipedia with links in citations, it's even easier to track things down.