Evidence

Subjects found, Documents lost

Three Monstrosities of Information

This article discusses three of my books and the types of information monstrosities they present

Auto-Documentality as Rights and Powers

This paper discusses beings and their rights in terms of philosophical and documentation ontology. It discusses animal rights, rights of nature, and human rights. It discusses the role of representation in documents, documentation theory, and documentality. It discusses the difference between documentation and documentality

Documents and the Malady of Truth

This article discusses documents, knowledge, and truth through a conceptual examination and through an examination of Flaubert\u27s 19th century novel Madame Bovary. It argues that the main characters of Madame Bovary deceive themselves by believing that the contents of the fictional and medical texts they read convey truth. In contrast, the article argues that modern knowledge is constituted by documentary evidence operating in knowledge networks and processes where the result of such operations is what can be claimed to be true about the world through such processes. The representational malady that Madame and Doctor Bovary suffer in the novel was a common one among the emerging bourgeoisie of the time, but it is also a common one today, with the internet as the site of this plague

Powerful Particulars as “Autodocuments” in Documentality

The purpose of this short paper is to sketch the problem of whether documentality, in the sense of the appearance of evidence, must always take the form of a type-token relationship. In contrast to a type-token epistemology common in the Library and Information Science tradition, the paper argues that there is precedence for a theory of documentality that views evidentiality as a product of the powers of particulars to make themselves present. To make this argument, it appeals to Robert Pagès theory of documents and, over a half century later, Bernd Frohmann’s proposal for a philosophy of information, “Documentality.” Such a theoretical framework as Documentality may center its analysis around the problem of the evidentiality of natural entities rather than sociocultural or bibliographic entities. The paper argues that Documentality offers a theory of evidence or information through functions, performances, and powers rather than through content representation. Such a contrast describes the epistemology of Neo-Documentation versus that of earlier Otletian Documentation and the Library and Information Science tradition that follows from it

Documentarity

A historical-conceptual account of the different genres, technologies, modes of inscription, and innate powers of expression by which something becomes evident. In this book, Ronald Day offers a historical-conceptual account of how something becomes evident. Crossing philosophical ontology with documentary ontology, Day investigates the different genres, technologies, modes of inscription, and innate powers of expression by which something comes into presence and makes itself evident. He calls this philosophy of evidence documentarity, and it is through this theoretical lens that he examines documentary evidence (and documentation) within the tradition of Western philosophy, largely understood as representational in its epistemology, ontology, aesthetics, and politics. Day discusses the expression of beings or entities as evidence of what exists through a range of categories and modes, from Plato's notion that ideas are universal types expressed in evidential particulars to the representation of powerful particulars in social media and machine learning algorithms. He considers, among other topics, the contrast between positivist and anthropological documentation traditions; the ontological and epistemological importance of the documentary index; the nineteenth-century French novel's documentary realism and the avant-garde's critique of representation; performative literary genres; expression as a form of self evidence; and the “post-documentation” technologies of social media and machine learning, described as a posteriori, real-time technologies of documentation. Ultimately, the representational means are not only information and knowledge technologies but technologies of judgment, judging entities both descriptively and prescriptively

“Living Document”: From Documents to Documentality, from Mimesis to Performative Indexicality

In this article, in distinction to documentation as an epistemic understanding of documents, I will discuss the epistemology of documentality as an indexical theory of documental functions, which I will develop through Bruno Latour’s notion of information. This notion of indexicality is different than Suzanne Briet’s notion of indexicality (which I have discussed elsewhere (Briet, 2006)). I will begin this paper with an historical problem that illustrates the issues of viewing documents as content representation. This is the problem identified by Vincent Debaene (Debaene, 2014) in early and mid-twentieth century French field anthropology of the “two book” phenomenon, which attempted to address a perceived epistemic distance between lived experience and its representation through scientific documents. The solution to this problem of presence and representation was the writing and publication by French anthroplogists of a second, more literary, document after the production of the scientific paper or book, which supposedly represented the experience of the anthropologist and the group under study more fully. I will argue that both texts, however, followed genre conventions and practices, which are neither more or less faithful to an original experience. I will argue that the notion of an original experience reflected in the content of the text misses the performatively indexical relationship of text to world and the role that this plays in scientific and other forms of documentality. In short, what Vincent Debaene identified as the French anthropologists’ quest for producing a “living documents,” which closes the gap between life and documental representation, is a Quixotic task, since the problem is not real but rather is a product of the epistemology of re-presentation, which forecloses from our understanding what really happens with scientific and other documents

Sense in Documentary Reference: Documentation, Literature, and the Post-documentary Perspective

Reference in modern documentation is largely governed by theories of evidential representation by documents, as the ‘contents’ of documents. In contrast, newer, what I call ‘post-documentary,’ technologies more emphasize the role of sense in the creation of reference. This paper investigates the implications upon the modernist category of ‘documentation’ and ‘document’ when this shift is taken into account. It also examines the implications upon ‘literature’ as a modernist category that evolved toward contesting modern documentation in the creation of evidence

Documental Fixity

The article discusses the concept of fixity in documents and documentality. Issues of control and power are discusses as related to these concepts

On the Relationship between Library and Information Professionalism and Social Informatics

Unpublished essaySocial informatics is intrinsic to any profession and to any professional education that deals with information and information technologies. Thus, there is a direct relationship between the professional activities of librarianship and the activities of social informatics. That relationship involves rethinking libraries, library services, and information management agency in terms of what libraries and similar institutions have been, what they are said to be, and what they may be in the future