Kent State University's School of Library and Information Science will host the 11th annual meeting of the Document Academy (DOCAM) from Aug. 7 to 9, 2014, with an optional preconference gathering on the evening of Aug. 6. Co-chairs of this year's conference are SLIS Assistant Professor Kiersten F. Latham, Ph.D., and SLIS adjunct instructor Jodi Kearns, Ph.D.
The Document Academy originated as a co-sponsored effort by the Program of Documentation Studies, University of Tromso, Norway, and the School of Information, University of California, Berkeley. Members of the organization represent 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 Document Academy fosters a multidisciplinary space for experimental and critical research on the document in the widest sense, drawing on scholarship, traditions, and experiences from the arts, humanities, social sciences, education, and natural science, and from diverse fields, such as information, media, museum, archives, culture, and science studies.
The theme of this year's meeting is "Documents Without Borders," which embodies the interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary natures of document studies. In this light, the program committee encourages proposals promoting document discourse that is open to all formats, contents, and disciplines.
The 2014 conference at Kent State will includes a new feature that takes advantage of the unique facilities offered in SLIS. For the "DOCAM’14 Instantiation," the planning committee design and arrange a three-dimensional space in the new MuseLab in SLIS to showcase documents representing all accepted proposals for the annual conference. Representative documents will be sent in by authors and can be of any possible form, assuming it can be exhibited within given parameters. The MuseLab, where the Instantiation will be held, is a creative and collaborative space for thinking, doing and learning about museal things.
Proposal submissions should be sent to Jodi Kearns (jkearns@uakron.edu) no later than March 15, 2014. Decisions will be announced by April 15, 2014.
