Experimental Document Analysis—an analytical framework for document design

In this paper I will present an analytical framework for future documents, an experimental document analysis providing support for document design. The American economist, Herbert A. Simon outlined how to design an artificial object in his work The Sciences of the Artificial (1969, 1996) and described how this can be done in a systematic way, by a science of design. Simon describes the design process as a matter of finding possible alternatives among the potential optimal alternatives and finding a satisficing solution, by which he means a solution in-between satisfactory solutions and optimal solutions which can work in real life, expressing a rationality bounded by the conditions given by the environment. I will illustrate the experimental document analysis by an historical example of a pasticcio opera in the 18th century, Dido Abbandonata by P. Metastastio and multiple composers. I will discuss how this kind of document analysis may open for a comparative approach in documentation research in general