To inaugurate a new interdisciplinary inquiry into the role of digital documents in our changing culture, a workshop was held at the 28th annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, in January 1995. The workshop brought together a diverse group of thirteen thinkers, practitioners, technologists and humanists to try to develop a more insightful, holistic grasp of emerging forms of information encapsulated as documents.
Documents lie at the interface of content, format, use, and technology.
Whether in print, sound, video, electronic, or multimedia formats, documents are social and cultural artifacts, whose use and interpretation vary with content and context. These new forms, coupled with the rapid change of the new technologies that improve and speed the effectiveness and efficiency with which these digital documents are handled, promise to have a profound effect on a wide range of human endeavor, breaking down barriers, of form, time, and space. As a growing array of new electronic technologies insinuate themselves into business, education, government, and personal life, a growing challenge is how to make sense of the emerging forms of information. We intuitively understand that electronic mail, databases, the Internet, CD-ROMs, cellular communication devices, personal digital assistants, and other digital systems function quite differently than traditional print documents, and that they enable people, communities and institutions to interact in intriguing new ways. The need for a new interdisciplinary discourse is critical.