Documentary studies emerged from library science in the 19th century. Traditionally, it was thought that the model of the document was the book. Paul Otlet, Belgian theorist, author and lawyer, is considered one of the main fathers of documentation as we know it. Through his extensive work, Otlet was able to advance our understanding of documentation beyond books, so that it encompasses journals, periodicals, bibliographies, and maps. other things. Otlet theorized that anything can be a document as long as one knows about it by observing it. (Black, 2016) (Jones, 2010)Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Suzanne Briet Madame Documentation, an author, librarian, and historian, developed the idea of ​​a document, proposing that even something that was not intended to be a document could become one for some people. “Is a star a document? Is a stone rolled by a torrent a document? Is a living animal a document? No. But photographs and catalogs of stars, stones in a mineralogy museum, and animals cataloged and displayed in a zoo are documents. (Day, 2014) A common aspect considered to make a document a document is the idea that it has “productivity”. Briet demonstrated this when she described the different ways in which documentation was cataloged and reproduced in the case of an antelope; the antelope was recorded and featured in films, its cataloged details entering the Azoological Encyclopedia, when it died it was stuffed and placed in a museum where photographs of it were taken and its notes analyzed and broadcast. With this Briet proposed that countless secondary documents could be produced from a primary, productivity therefore being an important element that distinguishes the documentation. (Day, 2008) This example of antelope reproduction and productivity with documentation could also be applied to works of art, including landscape illustrations. A painter may be interviewed during the creation of the landscape, recordings of his voice may be circulated in schools, the finished work may be placed in a museum and all the sketches leading up to it preserved by an anthropologist, landscape painting can be seen by members of the public, discussed and analyzed, written down, and it can be sketched, copied and reproduced through photography. Briet also made the association between the document and indexicality by explaining that the document is "an indexical symbol or sign, something which points to another thing to which it refers". (Documentacademy.org, nd)Index (n.) late 14c., the index, from the Latin index (genitive indicis) the one who reports, discloser, discoverer, informant; index (because used to point); pointer, sign; title, inscription, list, literally anything that points out, indicates, points out.” American philosopher Nelson Goodman theorized that works of art are symbols within symbolic systems, creating a synergy between art and information; that science and art contribute equally to our understanding of the world. “In art – and I think also in science – emotion and cognition are interdependent: feeling without understanding is blind, and understanding without feeling is empty. » (Goodman, 1984) (Goodman, 1987) “Cultural information transmits knowledge about the codes and conventions that inform visual images; it focuses not on the artist but on the sociocultural conditions in which it is produced. Additionally, it gives clues to the viewer about historical and geographical features; for example, the style of Chinese paintings guides the viewer into an Eastern perspective, while the style of Italian Renaissance painting suggests a European historical perspective. » (Jamieson, 2007) Over time, certain symbols and signs have developed in our collective understanding to refer to something else within a larger system. Ferdinand de Saussure, Swiss linguist and semiotician, proposed that they are two essential elements in the signaling of a sign; the Signifier and the Signified. The Signifier is described as the sign, for example a symbol, a color or a word and the Signified is the object or concept to which it refers. Figure 6 Edwin Butler Bayliss (1874-1950) Blast Furnaces, Night, Date unknown. Oil on canvas, 39.5 cm x 54.5 cm. (The Athenaeum, n.d.) In Edwin Butler Bayliss's painting Blast Furnaces, Night, the vivid strokes of glowing orange appear to be fires, and because of their small flame shapes we read the fires as controlled and tamed . This would mean that they are built and maintained by man, alerting us to the presence of a person or most likely people who populate or frequent the region. Thus a narrative and understanding develops by reading visual language, we in turn are informed of a moment in human history due to the presence of small spots of color and our interpretation of these. “To satisfy our doubts it is necessary that a method be found by and our beliefs can be determined by nothing human, but by some external permanence – by something on which our thought has no effect. Our external permanence would not be external, in our sense, if its influence were limited to a single individual. It must be something that affects, or could affect, every man. And although these affections are necessarily as diverse as are the individual conditions, yet the method must be such that the final conclusion of each man is the same. This is the method of science. Its fundamental hypothesis, reformulated in more familiar language, is the following: there exist real things, the characters of which are entirely independent of our opinion about them; these Reals affect our senses according to regular laws, and, although our sensations are as different as are our relations to objects, yet, by taking advantage of the laws of perception, we can verify by reasoning how things really are. and truly; and every man, if he has sufficient experience and if he reasons sufficiently on this subject, will be led to that which Charles Sanders Peirce, one of the founders of semiotics, considered signs to be one of the three following categories: Icon, Index or Symbol. An icon as something that is physically similar to the thing it refers to, for example a drawing of a bicycle to reference a bicycle, an index as something that implies via a recognized link, for example smoke as an indicator of fire, and a symbol as a sign learned for example a skull and crossbones on a yellow background as an indicator of toxicity; an association that would be understood or not depending on the culture, geography and language of the person reading it. Visual language emerged just like other languages ​​– by people who created and spoke it. (Jacobson, 2000) In this sense, we could interpret information from art, and here more specifically from landscape art, through the understanding of signs, codes and pictorial references as an assumed visual language, whether through indexicality, symbolism or icons, informed by our existing understandings of the world around us, internal and external. Duringinterpreting visual language in a work of art, there will be signs that we read differently, some that have an immediacy like a bright white ball against a black sky - this could be easily discerned as a moon informing us that the The image is that of a nocturnal scene, and others, or other aspects, with which the viewer questions more, as with abstract landscapes. Art as documentation “Language is not only verbal or written. Speech as a means of communication cannot be strictly separated from all human communicative activity, which also includes the visual. The word “imagination” definitely suggests that we can also think in images. Visual language is defined as a system of communication using visual elements. The term visual language in relation to vision describes the perception, understanding and production of visible signs. Just as people can verbalize their thoughts, they can visualize them. A diagram, a map, and a painting are all examples of visual language. Its structural units include line, shape, color, form, movement, texture, pattern, direction, orientation, scale, angle, space and proportion. Elements in an image represent concepts in a spatial context, rather than the linear temporal progression used in speaking and reading. Voice and visual communications are parallel and often interdependent means by which humans exchange information. (Co.Design, 2015) Stanley Spencer's 'A Gate, Yorkshire' is titled and dated in such a way that we are given information that allows for a better reading of the images we see, we are also aided by the searchable information that the painting of Spencer is from the point of view of Stock Lane Housegrounds.Pictorial representations of Yorkshireland refer to facts in the observable world, the geometrically divided quilt of different colored grasses, brick style, are painted directly from the location and all tell us something about the countryside at a specific time and place, and may even hint at information about the artist's unobservable internal world, such as atmosphere and emotion, especially in reference at the door which could be considered a symbol and metaphor of change, of worry, of travel; the comfortable proximity of the local earth to the vast beyond or growth. We have aided our understanding from the information given on date and location, which helps us place it in a historical trajectory; such elements complement our reading of the information contained in the table and play a determining role in the classification and documentation process. As part of Otlet's work, he developed what was considered a document by helping to fuel the idea that other resources such as maps and diaries could be reconsidered as documentary. If newspapers are a recognized form of documentation, what about the illustrations of reports that accompany newspaper articles, and what about books containing scientific illustrations, take for example botany, books which include biographical data with schematic illustrations. The Indian Ministry of Environment and Forests maintains a botanical documentation center. Survey of India which examines and records a large national database of Indian plants containing both botanical illustrations and paintings, even today, despite the fact that we now have photographs. (Moef.gov.in, nd) “During the 20th century, advances in the field of illustrationartistic botany continued. Professional and amateur artists made their contributions. The quality and accessibility of photography produced dramatic changes, and in many cases photographs displaced botanical illustrations. Photographs have the advantage of being an exact record of the living plant in all its details. They are quick to make and much easier to reproduce. However, there are still many occasions where botanical illustration has the advantage – for example when one wishes to recreate a living plant. extinct plant, or to show several stages of the life cycle (e.g. bud, flower and fruit in a single plant) or to highlight a particular characteristic of the plant. For all these reasons, there remain many professional botanical artists as well as dedicated amateurs. (Lazarus, Pardoe and Spillards, 1997) Before the invention of the camera, the creation of handmade images, such as drawing and painting, were the most popular means of recording and visually capturing the world that surrounds us. Since the dawn of time, human beings have strived to visually capture the world we perceive in all its similarities, particularly to preserve history and document life and culture; making this pioneering invention all the more revolutionary and revolutionary, even disturbing. The relationship between camera and artist became intertwined, with each having an influence on the other; and the perceived negative effects for artists such as portrait painters being in less demand were offset by the fact that they were able to use this same travel tool to provide them with benefits in terms of time management, precision and practicality. What is worth adding regarding landscape art and photography is that it has been well documented that landscape photographers have been and continue to be influenced by classical landscape paintings in execution of their artistry, often resulting in picturesque scenes mirroring romanticized landscape paintings. If a photograph can aesthetically accurately capture a person or landscape, then what is the need for art depicting a person or place? Perhaps landscape illustrations constitute a more in-depth in situ study of the landscape, in the sense that a painter must visit and revisit his location, examining in depth and considering each element of his landscape individually; the color of a street lamp, its cast shadow, the square of light springing from a building, they flow into creation, whereas one could argue that a photograph is much more instantaneous. Perhaps a landscaper is immersed in the environment longer. , whether by working on site or from a video or a photograph, and this immersion gives rise to an atmospheric documentation different from that of a photograph and therefore valuable in itself and just as deserving of recognition in terms of recording the environment. I think this is another aspect of landscape painting. , if it is to be interpreted as documentation that differs from landscape photography, it is because a painting tends to reflect the painter. That is to say, the artist's psyche is caught in the painting. A painting of a landscape is imbued with a mood felt and transmitted by the artist, something that may not result from photographing the same environment, however skillful and beautiful it may be. The extent to which landscape art is a form of documentation depends largely on the extent to which the viewer is led to interpret it as such. A landscape paintinginterpreted as a cultural document details a range of cultural things from the type of painting used, the type of painter using it, to the cultural interpretation of what constituted a landscape at the time the painting was made, and thus reflecting the painter in the world. to paint. The desire to conflate art with landscape has been evident since the days of ancient Rome, and the intrigue of art and its effects on landscape, and hence the effects of landscape on art, have been maintained. In today's era of information science, where we see an increase in everyday life documents, this desire has transformed into deeper analysis. For example, over the course of two days in June 2010, Tate Britain hosted a conference on “art and the environment” which concluded the end. of five years of programs sponsored by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The aim of these programs was to develop understanding of the landscape and environment through interactions between the visual arts and the material environment. The conference offered a scientific approach to art with themes ranging from ideas of globalization, economic geography, belonging, displacement and landscape militarism. (Tate.org.uk, nd) “Landscape and the environment have cultural significance as an area of ​​public interest, scientific research and artistic creativity. This program was designed to enrich our understanding of both by bringing together researchers from varied disciplines with a broad range of approaches. In order to learn more about how the world has been imagined, experienced, designed and managed, we needed to produce work that is critical and creative, collaborative and communicative. That we express complex ideas and feelings about beauty, belonging, access to resources of our relationship with the past and the future through nature, landscape and environment are the means by which we try often to make sense of the world and people's place in it. (Programmes et al., nd) How is meaning then established if landscape art must be read as documentation? Briet and Otlet asserted that documentation should concern all informative objects and not only books, magazines and newspapers. A museum object, like a document, is preserved for the purpose of providing evidence and references. Landscape paintings also reveal traces of human events; they capture and give us descriptions of environmental and cultural events across place and time. As illustration and landscape painting are generally purely pictorial, it would make sense that one way to interpret understanding would be to interpret visual language using semiotics, the study of meaning creation. The American philosopher Charles Sander Pierce described that there are three ways to understand this way: through the sign, the object and the interpretation. If we consider that the different elements of a landscape painting are consciously decided based on the signs, then the artist intentionally creates informative stimuli that elicit in each viewer a response guided by the information, involvement and intentions of the creator . (Mounin, 1985) Conclusion In a sense, landscape illustration and painting should be considered a good source of cultural documentation, perhaps more so than landscape photography, because, for some reason, painting tends to be more revealing of the artist than photography. A painting is full of brushstrokes and mixtures of different paints, which the artist has thought about for a considerable time. A landscape painting as a cultural document is like a window capturing a.)