What Is a Nondocument?

What is a nondocument? This vignette begins to explore this question by playfully presenting different inquiries from diverse angles with the aim of provoking reflections on this conceptual curiosity

A Duty to Document

Access to information is a bedrock principle of contemporary democratic governments and their public agencies and entities. Access to information depends upon these public institutions to document their activities and decisions. When public institutions do not document their activities and decisions, citizens’ right of access is ultimately denied. Public accountability and trust, in addition to institutional memory and the historical record, are undermined without the creation of appropriate records. Establishing and enforcing a duty to document helps promote accountability, openness, transparency, good governance, and public trust in public institutions. A duty to document should therefore be a fundamental component of access to information legislation and records and information management practices.This article begins a discussion on the concept and practice of a duty to document. Using Canada as a case study, this article\u27s main aim is to help illuminate the importance and implications of a duty to document in both access laws and records and information management policies to help ensure good governance practices

Foregrounding Documentation within Metaliteracy

Documentation plays a central role in metaliteracy. When individuals engage in metaliterate practices of creating, sharing, and assessing information, they are, in fact, engaging in practices with documents. Yet, while the goals and objectives of metaliteracy implicitly acknowledge documentation, they do not explicitly emphasize the fundamental roles played by it in helping facilitate and enable various metaliterate practices. This article aims to make these roles explicit. By foregrounding documentation – specifically documents and their associated practices – within metaliteracy, this article argues for the recognition of the fundamental roles played by documents and their associated practices within metaliterate practices and learning. Drawing upon scholarship in documentation and metaliteracy studies, the aim is to help illuminate metaliteracy’s materiality by emphasizing its documentation, or put differently, metaliteracy is not about or dealing with intangible abstractions but instead dealing with tangible objects, namely, documents

A Documentary-Material Approach for Performance

This article begins a conceptual discussion about the relationship between documentation, performance, and materiality. It argues that a documentary approach helps show the roles played by documents and practices with them in performance’s materialization and constitution. It presents the start of a documentary approach for analyzing performance by discussing some ways in which documentation helps provide a material basis for performance beyond its enactment whilst simultaneously materializing and constituting it in and for other diverse contexts

The Concept of Natureculture Document: A Conceptual Exploration of Seeds, Embodied Information, and Unconventional Records

Seedbanks, or so-called archival arks of the apocalypse, are addressing accelerating anthropocentric alterations to the environment by collecting, storing, and preserving seeds. These are specialized archival repositories that approach, frame, and use seeds as documents for agricultural and scientific research, classification and preservation work, and various other archival and administrative purposes. Seedbanks indeed are archives of unconventional records. This article introduces the concept of natureculture document as a framing device in which to help analyze the documentary status of objects that are not necessarily or usually considered as documents or having documentary characteristics. This concept, coupled with its interdisciplinary theoretical tools, offers fresh conceptual approaches to help analyze the documentary status of objects that are not typically considered documents. Drawing upon scholarship in documentation studies, environmental science, information philosophy, and feminist studies, this article begins a conceptual intervention within and for archival science through this concept and its application to seeds within seedbanks. The aim is to help broaden understandings of documents within specialized archival contexts, such as these archival arks of the apocalypse. The concept of natureculture document also serves as a point of departure for further studies of the documentation of objects that are regarded as unconventional or unusual within archival, administrative, and other institutional settings. It is hoped that this article contributes to greater scholarly attentiveness to our diverse and fragile more-than-human world constituted of and by humans and nonhumans, from seeds to documentation

From North Korea With Love: Reviewing Pyongyang’s Arirang Mass Games

This review of North Korea’s Airirang Mass Games presents a primary account and analysis of a performance unlike anything and unseen anywhere else in the contemporary world. This review contributes to the beginning of a conversation about this performance that has been nearly inaccessible and unavailable to most people, including most other academic researchers or commentators, outside of North Korea. It is arranged into a first-hand descriptive account and then an analysis of the Arirang Mass Games.This review analyses the Arirang Mass Games through a discussion of the materialization, enactment, and embodiment of the regime’s ethnocentric Communist ideology and culture. This analysis draws upon the work of performance philosophers and the work of other scholars and journalists, who have either analyzed and/or also attended the games, to start connecting the ways in which this performance can be regarded as the material embodiment of North Korean culture, national identity, and ideology, or at least the regime’s construction and fantasy of these aspects of the country.This review does not aim to provide justifications for or intend to give support to the North Korean government. Its purpose instead is twofold: first, to help shed light on a spectacular performance that few people outside of North Korea have experienced in such a little known or little understood country; and second, to present a perspective on repetition established in such an isolated and mysterious place, at least compared to the relative openness of most other countries, that few other individuals have personally experienced.

The Registration of Religious Identity: Parallels between the United States' (Proposed) Muslim Registry and Apartheid South Africa's Population Registration Act

This article explores aspects of the disciplinary documentation of religious, and by extension, racial identity within the context of post-9/11 United States. Using Donald Trump’s proposal for a Muslim registry as both a framing device and a point of departure, this article provides a comparative documentary analysis illuminating the chilling parallels between the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS) program in the United States and the Population Registration Act (PRA) of Apartheid South Africa. In both cases, documentation was used to control and discipline individuals according to particular aspects or features of their identity. In post-9/11 United States, the particular aspects or features of an individual’s identity of concern are their Islamic religious identity; meanwhile, in Apartheid South Africa, the aspects or features of identity that were of paramount significance were one’s race and ethnicity. This article helps provide some conceptual tools for scholars interested in the classification, registration, and documentation of diverse kinds of identities. It presents a documentary analysis of the racial registration strategies of Apartheid South Africa to help historicize and problematize the United States’ previous and proposed religious registry programs. Its aim is to draw lessons from South Africa’s painful past to provide an urgent warning of the oppressive implications of identity registrations like the NSEERS program and the worrying possibility of another misguided and counterproductive Muslim registry. Pre-print first published online 03/03/201

Book Review: Capital, State, Empire: The New American Way of Digital Warfare by Scott Timcke

Marc Kosciejew reviews Capital, State, Empire: The New American Way of Digital Warfare by Scott Timcke (2017; London: University of Westminster Press [ISBN: 978-1-911534-36-5])

Documentation and the Information of Art

This article outlines a documentary approach to the study of artistic practice, focusing on the ways in which information is materialised. It explores how processes of making, framing and interpreting art can be seen through a documentary lens, which offers an interdisciplinary perspective on the way information is created, conveyed and consumed