Document and archive: editing the past

Abstract

Document engineering has a difficult task: to propose tools and methods to manipulate contents and make sense of them. This task is still harder when dealing with archive, insofar as document engineering has not only to provide tools for expressing sense but above all tools and methods to keep contents accessible in their integrity and intelligible according to their meaning. However, these objectives may be contradictory: access implies to transform contents to make them accessible through networks, tools and devices. Intelligibility may imply to adapt contents to the current state of knowledge and capacity of understanding. But, by doing that, can we still speak of authenticity, integrity, or even the identity of documents? Document engineering has provided powerful means to express meaning and to turn an intention into a semiotic expression. Document repurposing has become a usual way for exploiting libraries, archives, etc. By enabling to reuse a specific part of a given content, repurposing techniques allow to entirely renegotiate the meaning of this part by changing its context, its interactivity, in short the way people can consider this piece of content and interpret it. Put in this way, there could be an antinomy between archiving and document engineering. However, transforming document, editing content is an efficient way to keep them alive and compelling for people. Preserving contents does not consist in simply storing them but in actively transforming them to adapt them technically and keep them intelligible. Editing the past is then a new challenge, merging a content deontology with a document technology. This challenge implies to redefine some classical notions as authenticity and highlight the needs for new concepts and methods. Especially in a digital world, documents are permanently reconfigured by technical tools that produce variants, similar contents calling into question the usual definition the identity of documents. Editing the past calls for a new critics of variants.