Sintaxis alfabética y representación textual: de las bibliotecas y la mediación de sus catálogos

• Main Author: Paula PÉREZ-RODRÍGUEZ
• Format: Article
• Language: Catalan
• Published: Universidad de Salamanca 2020-01-01
• Series: 1616
• Subjects: humanidades; catálogos; ilustración; modernidad; lingüística documental; bibliotecas; alfabeto
• Online Access: https://revistas.usal.es/index.php/1616_Anuario_Literatura_Comp/article/view/22110

What is the problem that digital catalogues pose for the humanities? Where does it come from? How can we solve it? The following article deals with a layer of literary studies and access to books that is not usually accounted for: their classification and its limitations. I aim to offer some tentative answers to the questions raised. To this end, I critically approach the rationalizing and normalizing principles of the discipline of «Documentation Science», giving an account of it as a scientific specialization of the sensitivity proper to the Enlightment humanism. Next, I offer some case studies using the digital catalogues of the Complutense University of Madrid, Princeton University and WorldCat. With these examples, I show that the «controlled languages» of the libraries limit divergent and radical experiences of writing and reading in unethical ways. To conclude, I propose opening catalogues up to the OCR reading technology, as a possible alternative to the exclusionary logics that determine the current indexical system.