The seminar is based on the following paper by Anthony F. Blunt:
Blunt, A. F. A method of documentation for the humanities. International Federation for Documentation (F.I.D.) XIVth Conference, Oxford - London. The Hague : FID Central Secretariat, 1938. [3 pages, not numbered]
About Blunt's article:
In this short paper, Anthony Blunt analyses the method by which the documents are organized in the Warburg collection, which contains "the study of Fine Arts in the form of library, photographs and publications" (see Warburg Institute). He explains the complexity of artefact organization in the field of humanities using the examples of Blake's painting "The Ancient of Days" (representing God the Father as an old bearded man, kneeling and stretching down one hand holding a pair of compasses). For this painting to be properly studied/understood, exemplifies Blunt, it ought to be collocated to:
- A verse from the Book of Proverbs
- Milton's "Paradise Lost"
- Jehova of the Old Testament,
- Mythological figure of Urizen
- Plato's Timaeus
- Blake's painting of Newton,
- Figures in Italian 16th century art
Blunt then stresses that the problem of collocation across, what is traditionally regarded as disciplines and cross-sections of culture, is crucial for the proper study of e.g. history and religion, and specialised studies should not be limited by the boundaries of their particular disciplines. He asserts that art historians are especially prone to cut themselves off from other branches, such as history, by focusing on the physical artefact itself (provenance, attribution, restoration) or art work interpretation that is "executed in vacuum" which can then lead to "a wrong understanding of the whole epoch". Blunt criticised the lack of subject indices in giant state libraries (e.g. the then British Museum) from which users are not able to derive anything useful on the subject apart from what they already know from study of their own field. As a contrast, the method used in the Warburg collection, points out Blunt, allows cultural cross-section at any moment as opposed to a single line of development. The books are organized into four sections:
I Religion. Natural Science. Philosophy
II Language and Literature
III Fine Arts
IV Social and Political life
These sections are then divided in further subsections. Blunt states that, by using this method, it is possible to collocate all the books in humanities that are necessary in art study, and asserts that this arrangement allows closer collaboration between different specialized fields.
Seminar walkthrough
Attention was drawn to specific expressions and metaphors used by Blunt, and the following seven points from the article were analysed and put into a wider context.- Blunt's closing sentence: " But in present disorganized state of knowledge it is worth while clinging to even such a small thread as that here spun,
which, combined with other threads of the same kind woven by other group of scholars, may one day be twisted into a rope strong enough to support the
weight of assiduously collected information " [ibid. page 3]
- "The division of the arts into water-tight compartments has led not only to errors of detail interpretation but to the wrong understanding of whole
epochs." [ibid. page 2]
- "This specialization applies with at least as much force in history as in scientific fields ." [Blunt here refers to the previous paragraph where
her says " In the present state of knowledge and with the ordinary organisation of documentation various brunches of knowledge are entirely cut off from
one another. There are of course, experts in each, but to become such an expert now requires so thorough of knowledge of a small specialised field ...]
[ibid., page 1]
- "And without referring to all these various subjects it would not have been possible to give a full account of the meaning of the painted design"
[Blunt refers here to his example of Blake's painting "The ancient of days" for which he provides the following reference in a footnote" For a full discussion
of the painting cf. Journal of the Warburg Institute, vol 11, no. 1 "] [ibid., page 1]
- "As things stand at present there are two sorts of libraries available to students; the giant state libraries , such as that in the British Museum, or
the specialised libraries that deal with a particular subject." [ibid., page 2]
- "But speaking broadly about tradition which we call 'classical' has [co?]notated the whole way of thinking adopted by the [? unclear in the photocopy]
and even when its influence seems to be weak, closer analysis will often shew [SIC! show?] that fundamentally the ideas that appear to be new are only those
of the ancient world ['s?] slightly changed form" [ibid., page2]
- Opening paragraph "It is not my purpose in this paper to make any technical contribution to the science of documentation, to suggest any new method for the classification of documents or for the cataloguing of facts about painting." [ibid., page 1]
A demonstration was given of how we can have a glimpse into collocation of the same documents in different collections by cross-collection browsing in the ULRLS OPAC (University of London Research Library Services), and how this can be used to express a particular view of the 'epoch', 'culture', 'purpose', 'use' and 'policy'. One can only imagine how this, if better supported in OPACs, could be exploited in providing multiple 'views' or even better 'cross-sectorial' collocation than the one proposed by Blunt. This links the concerns expressed by Blunt to what we can see as a persistent and relevant problem in providing subject access to documents/collections. And although some of the problems of combining access points to documents may seem to be alleviated by technology, they are far from being solved or acknowledged.
The crucial problem is still the understanding of the real purpose of document collocation in order to give 'a full account of the subject' behind the IR system's front-end is far from being properly addressed or understood. This can be related to a more specific problems of various levels of semantics that needs to be resolved in information design.
Blunt's article is interesting from the point of view of its subject, the way it is presented but also from the point of view of when it is written and by whom. Taking on Blunt's own argument that we need a cross-sectorial, interdisciplinary research method one can pose the following questions:
- how should we view and interpret what we can perceive as the 'Blunt's epoch', or 'justify Blunt' - looking into the 1930s or 1938 when he wrote this paper,
facts about his work and life at the time, and his entire biography
- in what light and in which context we should put, for instance, the Warburg collection itself? How has it come to exist, where did the 'money behind it'
come from (where does Warburg family wealth comes from?) and how did it come to London
- what do we know of A. F. Blunt and how can we relate his concerns with the social and political aspects of research methods in history and humanities to
his 'political and human' choices
- how should we interpret Blunt's use of the terms 'documentation' and 'information'? This is seminar covers only one angle of John Lindsay's current research which he plans to publish as a research paper