Indexing It All: The Subject in the Age of Documentation, Information, and Data

History and Foundations of Information Science

by Ronald E. Day

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Information Science, Theory, Library Science

170 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

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.

Reviews

[William Anderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

While clearly written for an academic audience, and not the least accessible, there are several chapters which while used to support the central thesis, stand better on their own. The book begins to shine at the introduction of androids, or perhaps that is just how long it took for me to adjust to the author's tone.....

[Debbie Maron · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is amazing and a must-read for anyone interested in critical information (or in having their world turned upside down, lol). Especially useful if you've ever been interrogated about the differences between Information Science, Library Science, and how the two share commonalities and differ...this book might not make those distinctions clearer but historicize the positivism/scientism of the documentary tradition and how those kinds of models bear on organization, retrieval, and the digitally mediated social life. Fans of Buckland, Briet etc will like this.

[tricia · Rating 2 out of 5]

disconnected from reality, overly academic, impenetrable, minimal insight

[Mills College Library]

025.3 D2749 2014

[Esther Angulo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting bok about the evolution of the documentation field