Toward a “Third Order” Archival Interface: Research Notes on Some Theoretical and Practical Implications of Visual Explorations in the Canadian Context of Financial Electronic Records

This paper addresses challenges related to abstraction and representation of archival records and makes a number of theoretical and practical contributions to discussions in the archival literature on this topic. Reporting on an interdisciplinary research project aimed at creating a high-level interactive reference model of the Canadian context of financial electronic records, it contributes a framework for theorizing about societal context as a domain ontology and an approach to establishing the boundaries of societal context. It also draws upon information systems theory, in particular representation theory, to extend the theory of records as representations. It then moves on to discuss experiments in developing a prototype interactive visual representation of a domain ontology of the Canadian context of financial electronic records, suggesting that interactive visual representations that combine features of ontology editors and builders with features of tools for visual analysis may provide a good foundation for “third order” archival interfaces.