The Science of Writings and Documentation

Digital humanities merge with the history of writing as a means of communication, and also as a system that allows the introduction of a code to be deciphered to understand a message. Therefore, digital humanities are above all sciences of writing, irrespective of the different kinds of writing and the different media that are mobilized and used. The science of writings is derived from several traditions according to the French information science and communication studies researcher, Robert Estivals. First, it is about bibliotheconomy or the way in which libraries are managed, and second, bibliology and scriptology. The sciences of writing rely on documentation and constitute a kind of documentology, the scientific study of different kinds of documents. Ferraris thus evoked a theory of documentality that proves to be interesting for digital humanities, since it opens up opportunities for multidisciplinary “documentary” studies.