The Unknown Urban Realm

Book excerpt: 1.1. Methods of document description and analysis The task of describing and analyzing documents for some specific purpose is fairly old and well known. Although many methods have been evaluated and tested, every new problem needs a new kind of procedure. This is not surprising, because documents are very complex phenomena and their analysis depends on numerous considerations about formal characteristics, language, contents, and the role of man in relation to documents. In general there are at least five different approaches to document description: (a) The hermeneutical method. The main approach here is to interpret a document either in the light of its historical position at the time it was produced or from the viewpoint of its meaning today. Another variant of the hermeneutical method is to interpret the author's motives and intentions in writing the document, either by quoting and interpreting the document itself or by comparing it with the biography of the author. All the various kinds of hermeneutical interpretation try to reconstruct some of the conceptualization of the author, using different terms and systems from those of the author.