From Information to Documentary Practices

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.

“the term is relatively open and abstract and thus possible to fill with a variety of content;

apparently it is about people dealing with documents in various ways.”²⁹⁶ Therefore, documentary practices may essentially refer to practices with documents, regardless of the kinds of practices carried out and the kinds of documents involved therein. The main point advanced by these authors is that information emerges as an effect of documentary practices, and thus the practices are ontologically always prior to information. Given that practices determine the informativeness of documents, Frohmann proposes a philosophy of information anchored in documentary practices, which prompts the need to study the practices.²⁹⁷ What this requires is explained by Pilerot,²⁹⁸ but he relies on Trace, who states that the study of documentary practices incorporates “the study of how and why everyday (or ‘non-literary’) documents are created and used within social spheres – including organizational and institutional settings, as part of community locales, and in peoples’ personal lives.”²⁹⁹ However, what is crucial about this concept and perspective is that it is meant to direct attention from the information content of documents towards their social dimensions. While such approaches are more rare in library and archival fields, they also exist outside these scientific areas.

Lund examines how the social aspects of documents have been approached by scholars from outside the fields of libraries and archives, stating that such approaches reflect the emergence of a critical document theory.³⁰⁰ Karl Mannheim is one of the authors incorporated by Lund under this perspective. Mannheim differentiated between natural and cultural objectives, claiming that the latter had three meanings: objective, expressive and documentary. In Lund’s interpretation of Mannheim, the documentary meaning of an object is not explicitly expressed in the document, but rather arises unintentionally from its role in a context. Therefore, according to the documentary method proposed by Mannheim, documentary interpretation is concerned with the social role of documents.³⁰¹ Lund further mentions authors including Harold Garfinkel and Dorothy E. Smith, who constructed on this documentary method and developed their own method for studying documentary practices, i.e. ethnomethodology.

Indeed, ethnomethodology was mentioned by Trace as a key approach applied to study

296 Pilerot, “On Documentary Practices.”

297 Frohmann, “Documentation Redux”.

298 Pilerot, “On Documentary Practices.”

299 Trace, “Documenting Work and Working Documents.” In fact Trace doesn’t use the concept of documentary practice but rather “document work”. However, it seems to have the same meaning, as it arises from Trace’s discussion, as well as from Pilerot’s text, who makes recourse to Trace’s discussion.

300 Lund, Document Theory, 13.

301 Lund, Document Theory, 14.

documentary practices in the context of Workplace Studies.³⁰² However, according to Lund, Garfinkel and Smith focused on how documents are constructed to play instrumental roles, enforce power and rule through documents.³⁰³ Therefore, Lund argues that the critical documentary theory turned into a critical method for researching the dominant ruling patterns of a society.³⁰⁴ According to Lund a similar perspective focusing on the role of documents in social systems can also be identified in the works of Foucault;³⁰⁵ or in the works of Latour and Woolgar who studied how facts are constructed in laboratories by producing different types of documents.³⁰⁶ All such approaches, as well as others that cannot be mentioned in the space of this chapter, hold relevance and bring in new perspectives on documents. However, for the purpose of this chapter, it is worth contemplating an essay by Brown and Duguid, entitled The Social Life of Documents, within which the authors specifically focus on social aspects of documents in light of the changes triggered by digital technology.

The motivation behind studying social aspects of documents is provided by Brown and Duguid in the following statement: “seeing documents as the means to make and maintain social groups, not just the means to deliver information, makes it easier to understand the utility and success of new forms of document. This social understanding of documents should better explain the evolution of Web as a social and commercial phenomenon.”³⁰⁷ Starting from a critique of what Michael Reddy has called the conduit metaphor, namely the view that a document is just a carrier of information,³⁰⁸ Brown and Duguid argue that it is crucial to understand that documents do not simply communicate but rather coordinate social practices.³⁰⁹ They draw on two main theories in support of this statement. First, they cite the theories of Anselm Strauss in arguing for the importance of documents in forming communities; for instance, reflected in the way scientific journals bind intellectual communities together. They argue that “people with shared interests use communication technologies (both hi- and lo-tech) to help form themselves into created and self-organizing groups. To a significant degree, these are held together by documents circulating

302 Trace, “Documenting Work and Working Documents.”

303 Lund, Document Theory, 14-15.

304 Lund, Document Theory, 15.

305 Lund, Document Theory, 15.; See also Frohmann, “Documentation Redux,” 397, who relies on the theory of Foucault to support the argument that a philosophy of information should be anchored in a philosophy of documentation.

306 Lund, Document Theory, 16.

307 John S. Brown and Paul Duguid, “The Social Life of Documents,” First Monday 1, no. 1 (May 6, 1996).

308 Michael J. Reddy, “The Conduit Metaphor – A Case of Frame Conflict in Our Language about Language,” in Metaphor and Thought, ed. Andrew Ortony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 284–324.

309 See Brown and Duguid, “The Social Life of Documents”.

among members, keeping each conscious of being a member and aware of what others are up to.”³¹⁰ Second, Brown and Duguid draw on the theories of Benedict Anderson in arguing that the circulation of documents over large distances has created “imagined communities”, in the sense that they were spread on too large a scale for people to know each member of the community, yet they were imagining that a community existed through their shared use of documents. It is worth noting that Brown and Duguid also make recourse to Levy’s discussion about the fixity and fluidity of documents introduced in the previous subchapter, and argue that the theories of Anselm and Anderson help to explain the importance of speaking about the “same” thing and thus why fixity of documents is so important. In the case of digital documents, “attempts to introduce time stamps, hash marks, and other forms of electronic version identification stress how important to social and particularly legal institutions the idea of a fixed state of a document is.”³¹¹ Lund remarked that Brown and Duguid in fact “translate a number of related theories of social life into a unified theory of the role of documents in social life.”³¹² Such an interest is also present in the theory of Suzanne Briet, for whom documentation was a cultural technique. However, this becomes evident in the context of the next subchapter, where attention is paid to the relationship between digital technology and documentary practices.