Indexing It All

The Subject in the Age of Documentation, Information, and Data
Erscheinungsjahr 2014
ISBN: 978-0-262-02821-9
Verlag: MIT Press Ltd

Buch, Englisch, 184 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 236 mm, Gewicht: 386 g

Reihe: History and Foundations of Information Science

A critical history of the modern tradition of documentation, tracing the representation of individuals and groups in the form of documents, information, and data.In this book, Ronald Day offers a critical history of the modern tradition of documentation. Focusing on the documentary index (understood as a mode of social positioning), and drawing on the work of the French documentalist Suzanne Briet, Day explores the understanding and uses of indexicality. He examines the transition as indexes went from being explicit professional structures that mediated users and documents to being implicit infrastructural devices used in everyday information and communication acts. Doing so, he also traces three epistemic eras in the representation of individuals and groups, first in the forms of documents, then information, then data.Day investigates five cases from the modern tradition of documentation. He considers the socio-technical instrumentalism of Paul Otlet, “the father of European documentation” (contrasting it to the hermeneutic perspective of Martin Heidegger); the shift from documentation to information science and the accompanying transformation of persons and texts into users and information; social media's use of algorithms, further subsuming persons and texts; attempts to build android robots—to embody human agency within an information system that resembles a human being; and social “big data” as a technique of neoliberal governance that employs indexing and analytics for purposes of surveillance. Finally, Day considers the status of critique and judgment at a time when people and their rights of judgment are increasingly mediated, displaced, and replaced by modern documentary techniques.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Day, Ronald E. (Associate Professor, Indiana University)

Day, Ronald E.

Furner, Jonathan

Buckland, Michael

Krajewski, Markus

Fachgebiete

• Interdisziplinäres Bibliothekswesen, Informationswissenschaften Bibliothekswesen, Informationswissenschaften, Archivwesen
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Kultur- und Ideengeschichte

Über Autor(innen)

Krajewski, Markus
Markus Krajewski is Associate Professor of Media History at the Bauhaus University, Weimar. He is a developer of the bibliographic software Synapsen: A Hypertextual Card Index (www.verzetteln.de/synapsen)

Buckland, Michael
Michael Buckland is Emeritus Professor in the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley, and Codirector of the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative there.

Day, Ronald E.
Ronald E. Day is Professor in the Department of Information and Library Science in the School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering at Indiana University at Bloomington. He is the author of The Modern Invention of Information and Indexing it All (MIT Press).

Ronald E. Day is Associate Professor in the Department of Information and Library Science in the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University Bloomington.