From Documents to Information

According to Katherin Hayles, the increased interest in information relates to the dichotomy information-materiality as two separable and discrete analytical concepts, which emerged in different scientific areas in the 1940s-50s.²⁶² For example, she explains that molecular biology played a key role in this dichotomy, where the human body started being seen as information embodied in genes.²⁶³ This idea has influenced also social sciences, being reflected in the concept of meme – the cultural equivalent of gene – as discussed later in the dissertation.²⁶⁴ However, the scientific area of interest to us here is the development of Information Sciences, and especially Claude E. Shannon’s mathematical theory of communication, which defined information as a mathematical quantity without materiality or meaning, but simply signals to be sent over machines.²⁶⁵ According to Hayles, separating the information from the materials that carried it meant that information could become free-floating and unaffected by changes in the context or constraints of physical matter. From Hayles’ perspective, this allowed Shannon to develop very general theorems that applied to

258 Lund, Document Theory, 10-11.

259 Day, “The Erasure and Construction of History”, 81.

260 Michael Buckland, “A Brief Biography of Suzanne Renée Briet,” in What is Documentation?, ed. and trans.

Ronald E. Day et al. (Maryland, Toronto, Oxford: The Scarecrow Press, 2006), 3 .

261 See Lund, Document Theory.; See also Day, “The Erasure and Construction of History”.

262 Katherine N. Hayles, “The Condition of Virtuality,” in The Digital Dialectic – new essays on new media, ed., Peter Lunenfeld (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), 69.

263 Hayles, “The Condition of Virtuality,” 69-70.

264 See subchapter 7.2 in this dissertation.

265 Hayles, “The Condition of Virtuality.”; See also Shannon, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication”.

all carriers by which information could be transmitted.²⁶⁶ The idea attracted much attention and even spread to non-technical scientific fields, but despite its popularity there were warnings about the loss of meaning caused by de-contextualizing information. Accordingly, Hayles explains that “Shannon himself frequently cautioned that the theory was meant to apply only to certain technical situations, not to communication in general.”²⁶⁷ Indeed, Shannon explains that the semantic aspects of communication were not of concern for the engineer, and that the problem addressed referred to signal transmission, more precisely the possibilities of “reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point.”²⁶⁸ However, information circulating freely across time and space unconstrained by the limits of the material world was too powerful a vision, penetrating not only the sciences but also areas of life.²⁶⁹ Indeed, information has now become the order of the day: a precious good for people living in “information societies”, the key resource of the economy, and an essential source for human development.²⁷⁰ However, as Hayles rightly states, information obscures the material base as soon as it is available, which in fact conditions its ability to affect any outcomes whatsoever.²⁷¹ “Matter still matters” and this is evident when analysing the difference between digital and non-digital documents.

A traditional document has two dimensions: the informational content and the physical carrier. From a technical perspective, a digital document is considered to have three dimensions. First, it is a physical object, consisting of inscriptions on a physical carrier, namely 0s and 1s recorded on a physical entity. Second, it is a logical object consisting of computer readable code. Third, it is a conceptual object that makes sense to people, this referring to what is being displayed on the computer screen, e.g. intelligible grammatical sentences, images of people and objects, etc.²⁷² When digital documents are treated as information, their importance only relates to the third conceptual level, which makes sense to people. This is the equivalent of the content dimension in the case of traditional documents.

With regard to the carrier, while for traditional documents it was paper in the case of digital

266 Hayles, “The Condition of Virtuality,” 74.

267 Ibid.

268 Shannon, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” 5.

269 Hayles, “The Condition of Virtuality,” presents how this was reflected in science fiction novels.

270 See subchapter 7.3 in this dissertation.

271 Hayles, “The Condition of Virtuality,” 72.

272 Ken Thibodeau “Overview of Technological Approaches to Digital Preservation and Challenges in Coming Years,” The State of Digital Preservation: An International Perspective, Conference Proceedings, Washington D.C.: Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), 2002); See also National Library of Australia, Guidelines for the Preservation of Digital Heritage, 35, which explains that in the case of digital heritage rather than digital documents a fourth dimension emerges, namely digital documents as “bundles of essential elements that embody the message, purpose, or features for which the material was chosen for preservation”.

documents it is represented by the physical entity on which 0s and 1s are inscribed.²⁷³ The 0s and 1s are also some sort of “content”, namely a coded form of what is displayed on the screen, but this process is mediated by the logical level, which understands the physical inscriptions and renders them visible on the screen. As previously discussed, hardware without software is nothing, and vice versa is also true. Therefore, matter is still relevant, not only for transmitting information but also because digital documents only make sense to people if mediated by machines.²⁷⁴ A recent encyclopaedia of information and library science presents a definition of document very similar to that discussed in the context of MoW, emphasising the view that a document refers to information recorded on matter; it is “used to mean any information-carrying medium, regardless of format.”²⁷⁵ It is worth noting that some examples are listed: “books, manuscripts, videotapes and computer files and databases are all regarded as documents.”²⁷⁶ Accordingly, this definition also applies to digital documents, even if the relationship between carrier and content becomes complicated, as discussed above.

However, there are further aspects of digital documents that render them different from traditional ones.

Uricchio remarks that digital documents are not “stable and fixed in the way we think of photographs or films or books (although they can inhabit a range of positions from dynamic, like games, to stable, like e-books).”²⁷⁷ Discussing social media, which is a term used to refer to various applications that allow people to share resources and discuss,²⁷⁸ Uricchio argues that “blogs and wikis are not only highly dynamic as texts; they are examples of networked and collaborative cultural production.”²⁷⁹ John Mackenzie Owen notes similar aspects as being fundamental to digital objects, sharing the view that they are fluid and dynamic, interactive and collaborative. Indeed, both authors hold that these are defining characteristics of today’s digital media, arguing that the changes undergone by digital objects, as well as

273 This represents just an example. As stated above in this dissertation, the carrier can be of almost any kind.

274 For some remarks in this regard see Colin Webb, “The Malleability of Fire: Preserving Digital Information,”

in Managing Preservation for Libraries and Archives: Current Practice and Future Developments, ed., John Feather (England, USA: Ashgate, 2004), 27.

275 Penelope Street and David Orman, “Document,” in International Encyclopedia of Information and Library Science, ed. John Feather and Paul Sturges (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 144.

276 Ibid.

277 William Uricchio, “Moving beyond the Artifact: Lessons from Participatory Culture,” in Preserving the Digital Heritage: Principles and Policies, eds. Yola de Lusenet and Vincent Wintermans (Amsterdam:

Netherlands National Commission for UNESCO, 2007).

278 See entry on social media in Graham Davies and Fred Riley, “Glossary of ICT terminology,” in Information and Communications Technology for Language Teachers (ICT4LT), ed. Graham Davies (Slough, England:

Thames Valley University, 2012) http://www.ict4lt.org/en/en_glossary.htm (accessed 3 March 2013).

279 Uricchio, “Moving beyond the Artifact,” 17; blogs and wikis represent examples of social media.

their collaborative and interactive nature, are part of the object.²⁸⁰ In a preservation context, they argue that these aspects must also be preserved, as part of the digital object. This vision that they are constantly changing and interactive has even determined Yola de Lusenet to suggest that the preservation of digital heritage is much closer to the safeguarding of intangible heritage - constantly recreated by communities - than the traditional method of documentary heritage preservation based on conserving the carrier.²⁸¹ However, Levy does not agree that digital documents are fluid.²⁸² Accordingly, starting from the fact that fixity was a defining characteristic of documents, he notes that in comparison with paper documents, digital documents are usually characterised as follows: a paper document is stable, whereas a digital is unstable. The former is permanent, the latter is impermanent. The former is static and inactive, the latter dynamic, active and interactive. Finally, a paper document is fixed and rigid, while a digital document is fluid, malleable and changeable.

Based on these characteristics Levy suggests that if fixity reflects a defining characteristic of a document, digital objects cannot even be called documents, and proceeds to argue that perceiving digital documents as fluid arises from a misperception of the nature of documents.

In fact, Levy argues that, without exception, all documents are both fixed and fluid. He explains that people equate fixity with permanence; yet all documents change at times, and at other times remain stable. To emphasise this, he adopts a “genre approach”, arguing that

“documents come to us not as isolated artefacts but as instances of recognizable social types or genres – e.g. as novels, packing receipts, shopping lists, journal articles, and so on.”²⁸³ He argues that these categories and their interpretation change over time, also triggering changes in documents. We can fully agree with that interpretations change over time, and thus documents also become interpreted and re-interpreted. However, Levy does not necessarily bring the point across, because he argues against the technical fixity of documents - content fixed onto matter - by invoking changes at the phenomenological level. He states this clearly:

“fixity and fluidity is, to some extent, in the eyes of the beholder.”²⁸⁴ However, Buckland perceives Levy’s text in a different way, considering that he shows that an emphasis on technology has impeded us from understanding other dimensions of documents, or as

280 Mackenzie J. Owen, “Preserving the Digital Heritage: Roles and Responsibilities for heritage Repositories,”

in Preserving the Digital Heritage: Principles and Policies, eds. Yola de Lusenet and Vincent Wintermans (Amsterdam: Netherlands National Commission for UNESCO, 2007), 49.

281 Yola de Lusenet, “Tending the garden or harvesting the fields. Digital preservation and the UNESCO charter on the preservation of the digital heritage,” Library Trends 56, no. 1 (2007): 164-82.

282 David M. Levy, “Fixed or Fluid? Document Stability and New Media,” in Proceedings of ECHT 94 the ACM European Conference on Hypermedia Technology Sept 18-23, 1994, Edinburgh, UK, (1994), 24-31.

283 Levy, “Fixed or Fluid.”

284 Levy, “Fixed or Fluid,” 27.

Buckland puts it “understanding documents as documents.”²⁸⁵ Indeed, this may be true. Levy himself claimed his aim was to contribute to a better understanding of what documents are, and from certain perspectives he achieved this. However, speaking about fixity as perception does not help to understand how fixity has changed in a technical sense, expressed in the unity between carrier and content. Besides, most scholars consider that digital documents are very fluid, which leads to various problems in the context of preservation, as discussed below.²⁸⁶

Nevertheless, the fact that digital documents are perceived as fluid could explain why the concept of document - referring to a medium carrying information, as suggested by the definition noted just above - has been gradually replaced with that of information. However, this does not mean that the concept of information cannot imply the existence of a material dimension. This is exemplified by Buckland, who distinguishes three different understandings of information: information as process, information as knowledge and information as thing.²⁸⁷ Information as process refers to the act of informing, of communicating something, but for the purpose of this present dissertation this understanding has been left aside, the analysis focusing on the other two notions, which resemble the previous discussion on content and carrier. Information as knowledge refers to the facts that are being communicated, and is explained by Buckland as intangible: “one cannot touch it or measure it in any direct way.

Knowledge, belief, and opinion are personal, subjective, and conceptual. Therefore, to communicate them, they have to be expressed, described, or represented in some physical way, as a signal, text, or communication. Any such expression, description, or representation would be information-as-thing.”²⁸⁸ Buckland remarks that the conception of information as thing is not accepted by everyone, although information systems, as those represented by libraries and archives, can only deal with this aspect of information: “libraries deal with books; computer-based information systems handle data in the form of physical bits and bytes; museums deal directly with objects.”²⁸⁹ Indeed, even if the concept of document has been replaced with that of information, the notion of information can be approached to imply a physical dimension. Nevertheless, the problematic issue remains, owing to the theoretical differences between these concepts. According to Hjørland, a document designates something

285 Michael Buckland, “What is a ‘Document’?”

286 See subchapters 3.3.1 and 3.3.2 in this dissertation.

287 Buckland borrows these definitions from the Oxford English Dictionary to argue that they can be used as

“topography for information science”: see Michael Buckland, “Information as Thing,” Journal of the American Society for Information Science 42, no. 5 (1991): 351.

288 Michael Buckland, “Information as Thing,” 351.

289 Michael Buckland, “Information as Thing,” 352.

with a creator, history and context, which are missing in the case of information; “whereas the concept of information is related to formalization, automation, reductionism and decontextualization, the concepts of document and documentation implies to a greater extent to an emphasis on the historical, social and cultural contextualization and to a description of the different functions of documents.”²⁹⁰[sic] The notion that there are disadvantages in taking up the notion of information at the expense of that of document is reflected by the emergence of documentary practices, to which the analysis now turns.