Description of the thesaurus of the Colombian Literature Information System

Abstract

The paper focuses on the process of elaboration of the Sistema de Información de la Literatura Colombiana -SILC- (Colombian Literature Information System), as another contribution to the social appropriation of Colombian literature, given its character of collective knowledge, and not so much on the discussion of the forms of social representation of knowledge. Taking as its basis the distinction between concept and term, the thesaurus was built as a terminographical exercise in the organization of a documental language, that would act as an intermediary between an universal user and the literary policies of the SILC. The general theoretical frame of this research is conceptual history, as it is practiced in the German tradition. Nonetheless, traditional bibliographical sources were used to build the thesaurus. The paper describes the process of elaboration of this auxiliary tool for the SILC; resumes the internal organization of the SILC; recounts the precedents for this thesaurus; describes extensively the structure of the SILC Thesaurus; exposes the policies of indexation; and traces de guidelines for subsequent work. The SILC Thesaurus has configured a wide lexical spectrum, which, seen from the point of view of historiography, evidences anthological preferences in the use of universal words. In the same time, it shows singularities in the Colombian literary process. Various lines of work in the field of historical semantics are brought to light, as a path that allows to go deeper in the biography of many of the descriptors, that may well be considered as historical literary concepts.