Documentation studies arose from librarianship in the 19th century. Traditionally the document model was thought to be 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 the understanding of documentation beyond books to include journals, periodicals, bibliographies and maps among other things. Otlet theorized that anything can be a document as long as one is informed by looking at it. (Black, 2016) (Jones, 2010) Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Suzanne Briet Madame Documentation, author, librarian, and historian, expanded the idea of ​​a document, proposing that even something that was not intended as a document could become one for certain people. “Is a star a document? Is a stone thrown from a stream a document? Is a living animal a document? No. But photographs and catalogs of stars, stones in a mineralogy museum and animals that are cataloged and exhibited 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 he described the various ways in which records were cataloged and reproduced in the case of an antelope; the antelope was recorded and featured on film, its details cataloged into a zoological encyclopedia, when it died it was stuffed and placed in a museum where photographs were taken and its notes analyzed and circulated. With this Briet proposed that countless secondary documents could be produced by a primary, so productivity is an important element that distinguishes documentation. (Day, 2008) This example of reproduction and productivity with antelope documentation could also be applied to works of art, including landscape illustrations. A painter can be interviewed while creating the landscape, recordings of his voice can be circulated in schools, the finished work can be placed in a museum and all the sketches that precede it are preserved by an anthropologist, the landscape painting can be seen by members of the public, discussed and analysed, written down, and can be sketched, copied and reproduced through photography. Briet also made the association between document and indexicality by explaining that document is "an indexical symbol or sign, something that points to another thing to which it refers." (Documentacademy.org, nd)Index (n.) late 14th century, the index, from the Latin index (genitive indices) one who indicates, revealer, discoverer, informant; index (because used to indicate); pointer, sign; title, inscription, list, literally everything that indicates, to be indicated or underlined”. The 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 in science too – emotion and cognition are interdependent: feeling without understanding is blind, and understanding without feeling is empty.” (Goodman, 1984) (Goodman, 1987) “Cultural information conveys knowledge about the codes and conventions that inform visual images; it does not focus on the artist but on the socio-cultural conditions in which he is produced. Additionally, it provides the viewer with clues to historical and geographic 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, some symbols and signs have been developed in our collective understanding to refer to something else within a larger system. Ferdinand de Saussure, a Swiss linguist and semiologist, stated that there are two essential elements for reporting a sign; the Signifier and the Meaning. The Signifier is described as the sign, for example a symbol, a color or a word and the Meaning 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' painting, Blast Furnaces, Night, the vivid strokes of bright orange appear to be fires, and because of their small flame shapes, we read that the fires are controlled and tamed. This would mean that they are artificial and maintained, suggesting to us the presence of a person or most likely people who populate or frequent the area. Therefore, through reading the visual language, a narrative and an understanding develops which we are in turn informed about a moment in human history by the presence of small spots of color and our interpretation of them. “To satisfy our doubts it is necessary that we find a method by which our beliefs may not be determined by anything human, but by some external permanence, by something on which our thoughts have no effect. Our external permanence would not be external, in the sense we understand it, if it were limited in its influence to an individual. It must be something that affects, or could affect, every man. And, though these affections are necessarily as varied as are the individual conditions, yet the method must be such that every man's ultimate conclusion is the same. This is the method of science. His fundamental hypothesis, reformulated in more familiar language, is this: there exist Real things, whose characters are quite independent of our opinions about them; those Reals influence our senses according to regular laws, and, although our sensations are as diverse as our relations to objects are, yet, taking advantage of the laws of perception, we can ascertain by reasoning how things really and truly are; and every man, if he has enough experience and reasons enough, will be led to that Charles Sanders Peirce, one of the founders of semiotics, considered signs as one of three 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 refer to a bicycle, an Index as something that implies through a recognized connection, for example smoke as an indicator of fire, and a Symbol as a learned sign for example a skull and crossbones on a yellow background as an indicator of toxicity; an association that would be understood or not understood depending on the culture, geography and language of the person reading it. Visual language emerged just as other languages ​​have emerged: from people creating and speaking it.” (Jacobson, 2000) In this sense, we could interpret information coming from art, and here more specifically from landscape art, through the understanding of signs, codes and pictorial references as an assumed visual language, be it through indexicality , symbolism or icons, informed by our existing understandings of the world around us, internal and external. As we interpret the visual language in a work of art there will be signs that we read differently, some that have immediacy such as a white glowing ball against a black sky - this could easily be spotted as a moon informing us that the image it's about a scenenocturnal, and others, or other aspects, with respect to which there is more wonder on the part of the spectator, as in the case of abstract landscapes. Art as documentation “Language is not only verbal or written. Word as a means of communication cannot be strictly separated from all human communicative activity, which also includes visual activity. The word “imagination” certainly suggests that we can also think in images. Visual language is defined as a communication system that uses 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, shape, motion, texture, pattern, direction, orientation, scale, angle, space, and proportion. Elements in an image represent concepts in a spatial context, rather than the time-based linear progression used in speaking and reading. Vocal and visual communication are parallel and often interdependent means through which humans exchange information. (Co.Design, 2015) Stanley Spencer's "A Gate, Yorkshire" is titled and dated in such a way as to provide us with information that allows for a better reading of the images we see, we are also helped with the searchable information that Spencer's painting is of the our view from Stock Lane Housegrounds. The pictorial depictions of Yorkshireland reference facts in the observable world, the geometrically divided quilt of different colored grass, the style of brickwork, are painted directly from the location and all tell us something about the countryside at a specific time and place, and can also suggest information about the artist's unobservable internal world, such as atmosphere and emotion, particularly in reference to the gate which could be seen as a symbol and metaphor of change, trepidation, travel; the cozy closeness of local land to the vast beyond, or growth. We were aided in our understanding by the information provided of date and location, which helps us place it in a historical trajectory; these elements integrate our reading of the information in the painting and are instrumental to the classification and documentation process. In one part of Otlet's work he expanded what was considered a document by helping to popularize the idea that other resources such as maps and newspapers could be considered documentary. If newspapers are a recognized form of documentation, what about reportage illustrations that accompany newspaper articles, and then books with scientific illustrations, let's take botany for example, books that include biographical data with diagrammatic illustrations? The Indian Ministry of Environment and Forests operates an India Survey Botanical Laboratory which examines and records a significant national database of Indian plants containing both botanical illustrations and paintings even today, despite the fact that we now have photography. (Moef.gov.in, n.d.)“During the twentieth century, progress in botanical artistic illustration continued. Both professional and amateur artists made their contributions. The quality and accessibility of photography has produced spectacular changes, and in many situations photographs have displaced botanical illustrations. Photographs have the advantage of being an exact documentation of the living plant in all its details. They are quick to produce and much easier to replicate. However, there are still many occasions where botanical illustration has the advantage, such as when desiredreconstruct an extinct plant, or to show different phases of the life cycle (for example the bud, flower and fruit in a plant) or to emphasize a particular characteristic of the plant. For all these reasons there remain many professional botanical artists as well as amateur enthusiasts. (Lazarus, Pardoe, & Spillards, 1997) Before the invention of the camera, hand-made image creation, such as drawing and painting, were the most popular means of visually recording and capturing the world around us. Since the beginning of time, humans have sought to visually capture the world we perceive in all its guises, including to preserve history and document life and culture; making this pioneering invention even more revolutionary and innovative, even disturbing. The relationship between camera and artist was intertwined with the influence of one on the other; and the perceived negative effects for artists such as less in-demand portrait painters were balanced by the fact that they were able to use this same moving tool to benefit them in terms of time management, accuracy and practicality. Something 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 the execution of their artistry, often resulting in picturesque scenes that reflect romantic landscape paintings. If a photograph can accurately aesthetically capture a person or landscape, then what is the need for art that depicts a person or place? Perhaps landscape illustrations are a more in-depth in situ study of the landscape, in the sense that a painter must visit and revisit the place in which he finds himself, looking deeply and considering each feature of his landscape individually; the color of a street lamp, its long shadow, the square of light coming out of an apartment building, pour into the creation, whereas one could argue that a photograph is much more instantaneous. Perhaps a landscape designer is immersed in the environment for longer, either working on site or starting from a video or photograph, and this immersion lends itself to atmospheric documentation dissimilar to that of a photograph and therefore valuable in itself and equally worthy of recognition in terms of recording the environment. I think another aspect of landscape painting, if it is to be interpreted as a different documentation than landscape photography, is that a painting tends to reflect the painter. That is, the artist's psyche is captured in the painting. A painting of a landscape is imbued with a mood felt and conveyed by the artist, something that perhaps does not result from photography of the same environment, no matter how skillful and beautiful the photography. The extent to which landscape art is a form of documentation depends largely on the extent to which the viewer is pushed to interpret it as such. A landscape painting interpreted as a cultural document details a number of cultural aspects, from the type of paint in use, to the type of painter using it, to the cultural interpretation of what constituted a landscape at the time the painting was was created, thus reflecting the painter in the environment. PAINT. The desire to blend art with landscape has been evident since the times of ancient Rome, and the intrigue of art and its effect on landscape, and, in turn, the effects of landscape on art, is remained constant. In today's age of information science, where there is an increase in documents in everyday life, this desire has branched out into further analyses, for example, over the course of two days in June 2010 Tate Britainorganized a conference on "Arts and the Environment" that capped 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 landscape and the environment through engagement between visual art and the material environment. The conference favored a scientific approach to art with themes ranging from ideas of globalization, economic geography, belonging, displacement and landscape militarism. (Tate.org.uk, n.d.) “Landscape and the environment have cultural significance as an area of ​​public interest, academic inquiry and artistic creativity. This program is designed to enrich our understanding of both by bringing together researchers from various disciplines with a broad range of approaches. To learn more about the ways in which the world has been imagined, experienced, designed and managed, we need to produce work that is critical and creative, collaborative and communicative. Whether we are expressing complex ideas and feelings about beauty, about belonging, about access to the resources of our relationship with the past and the future through nature, landscape and the environment are the medium through which we often try to give a sense of the world and people's place in it. (Programmes et al., n.d.)How is meaning established if landscape art is to be read as documentation, then?Both Briet and Otlet stated that documentation should cover all information objects and not just books, magazines and newspapers. A museum object, such as a document, is preserved for the function of providing evidence and reference. Even landscape paintings reveal traces of human events; they capture and provide us with descriptions of environmental and cultural events across place and time. Since illustration and landscape painting are generally purely pictorial, it would make sense that one way to interpret understanding is through the interpretation of visual language using semiotics, the study of meaning making. American philosopher Charles Sander Pierce described that there are three ways we understand this way; through sign, object and interpretation. If we consider the different elements within a landscape painting to be consciously decided on marks, then the artist is intentionally creating informative stimuli that evoke in each viewer a response driven by the information, involvement and intentions of the creator. (Mounin, 1985) Conclusion In some ways landscape illustration and painting should be seen as a good source of cultural documentation, perhaps more so than landscape photography because, for a reason, painting has a tendency to be more revealing about the artist with respect to photography. A painting is full of different brush strokes and mixtures of colours, all worked on by the artist over a considerable period of time. A landscape painting as a cultural document is like a window that captures a moment in time, a window you can stand on both sides of. On the one hand you can see the representation of a landscape, on the other you can see the painter captured in his time in rather intimate details. The same goes for a photograph, but perhaps it may not have the same intimacy as a painting. If historians need a source of information about landscape and the environment, before the invention of the camera, the closest they can get to evidence similar to that provided by photographic evidence is through paintings and descriptions of landscape. If Briet's characterization of what it requires to be a document is held true, then in my view a landscape illustration or painting could in fact be accepted as.)