Documentarity
Documentarity

Author: Ronald E. Day

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2019-10-01

Total Pages: 195

ISBN-13: 0262356031

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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.

Using Documents
Using Documents

Author: Gerald Hartung

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2022-09-20

Total Pages: 203

ISBN-13: 3110780941

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Using Documents presents an interdisciplinary discussion of human communication by means of documents, e.g., letters. Cultural scientists, together with researchers from media science and media engineering, analyze questions of document modeling, including a document’s contexts of use, on the basis of cultural theory. The research also concerns the debate on the material turn in the fields of cultural studies and media studies. Looking back on existing work, texts on written communication by the philosopher and sociologist Georg Simmel and by an interdisciplinary French group of authors under the pseudonym Roger T. Pédauque are taken as a starting point and presented afresh. A look ahead to the future is also attempted. Whereas the modeling (including technical modeling) of documents has to date largely been limited to the description of output forms and specific content, the foundations are laid here for including documents’ contexts of use in models that are grounded in cultural theory.

Hyperdocumentation
Hyperdocumentation

Author: Olivier Le Deuff

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2021-08-25

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 1119855578

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The term "hyperdocumentation" is a hyperbole that seems to characterize a paradox. The leading discussions on this topic bring in diverse ideas such as that of data, the fantasy of Big Data, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, algorithmic processing, the flow of information and the outstanding successes of disinformation. The purpose of this book is to show that the current context of documentation is just another step in human construction that has been ongoing for not centuries but millennia and which, since the end of the 19th century, has been accelerating. Coined by Paul Otlet in 1934 in his Traite de Documentation, "hyperdocumentation" refers to the concept of documentation that is constantly being expanded and extended in its functionalities and prerogatives. While, according to Otlet, everything could potentially be documented in this way, increasingly we find that it is our lives that are being hyperdocumented. Hyperdocumentation manifests as an increase not only in the quantity of information that is processed but also in its scope, as information is progressively integrated across areas that were previously poorly documented or even undocumented.

The Political Novel in the South Slavic Intercultural Context
The Political Novel in the South Slavic Intercultural Context

Author: Ethem Mandic

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2023-09-18

Total Pages: 303

ISBN-13: 166692850X

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The Political Novel in the South Slavic Intercultural Context investigates the problem of the genre of the most elusive literary genre: the political novel, and the presence of “political” in novels of South Slavic literature, primarily in the intercultural South Slavic social context, as well as in the context of contemporary history of Southeast and Central Europe. This genre in the South Slavic inter-literary context has not yet been scientifically and systematically studied and presented, although there are critical and scientific reviews that indicate its presence in literary production. The best novels from the canonical South Slavic authors Miroslav Krleža, Mihailo Lalić, Oskar Davičo, Miodrag Bulatović, Ivo Andrić, Meša Selimović, Borislav Pekić, Mirko Kovač, Danilo Kiš, and others included in this book thematize the political concepts of the twentieth century, so in the broadest sense they can be considered within the genre of political novel, including its subgenre variants. The political novel in South Slavic literatures (in the intercultural context) in general is a specific genre of the novel in relation to the political novel written in the West, an inter-literary phenomenon that was a critique of the Titoist regime and a literary response to the poetics and politics of social realism. It is conditioned by specific historical-political and social movements during the twentieth century. The narrative of the political novel is a poetic resistance to ideological consciousness and a dogmatic view of reality.

Indexing It All
Indexing It All

Author: Ronald E. Day

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2014-09-12

Total Pages: 185

ISBN-13: 0262028212

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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.

Picture-Work
Picture-Work

Author: Diana Kamin

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2023-11-21

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 0262377039

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How the image collection, organized and made available for public consumption, came to define a key feature of contemporary visual culture. The origins of today’s kaleidoscopic digital visual culture are many. In this book, Diana Kamin traces the sharing of photographs to an image economy developed throughout the twentieth century by major institutions. Picture-Work examines how three of these institutions—the New York Public Library, the Museum of Modern Art, and the stock agency H. Armstrong Roberts Inc.—defined the public’s understanding of what the photographic image is, while building vast collections with universalizing ambitions. Highlighting underexplored figures, such as the first rights and reproduction manager at MoMA Pearl Moeller and visionary NYPL librarian Romana Javitz, and underexplored professional practices, Diana Kamin demonstrates how bureaucratic work communicates ideas about images to the public. Kamin artfully shows how the public interfaces with these image collections through systems of classification and protocols of search and retrieval. These interactions, in turn, shape contemporary image culture, including concepts of authorship, art, property, and value, as well as logics of indexing, tagging, and hyperlinking. Together, these interactions have forged a concept of the image as alienable content, which has intensified with the advent of digital techniques for managing image collections. To survey the complicated process of digitization in the nineties and early aughts, Kamin also includes interviews with photographers, digital asset management system designers, librarians, and artists on their working practices.

Knowledge Unbound
Knowledge Unbound

Author: Peter Suber

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2016-04-06

Total Pages: 453

ISBN-13: 0262329565

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Influential writings make the case for open access to research, explore its implications, and document the early struggles and successes of the open access movement. Peter Suber has been a leading advocate for open access since 2001 and has worked full time on issues of open access since 2003. As a professor of philosophy during the early days of the internet, he realized its power and potential as a medium for scholarship. As he writes now, “it was like an asteroid crash, fundamentally changing the environment, challenging dinosaurs to adapt, and challenging all of us to figure out whether we were dinosaurs.” When Suber began putting his writings and course materials online for anyone to use for any purpose, he soon experienced the benefits of that wider exposure. In 2001, he started a newsletter—the Free Online Scholarship Newsletter, which later became the SPARC Open Access Newsletter—in which he explored the implications of open access for research and scholarship. This book offers a selection of some of Suber's most significant and influential writings on open access from 2002 to 2010. In these texts, Suber makes the case for open access to research; answers common questions, objections, and misunderstandings; analyzes policy issues; and documents the growth and evolution of open access during its most critical early decade.

Fantasies of the Library
Fantasies of the Library

Author: Anna-Sophie Springer

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2018-08-28

Total Pages: 161

ISBN-13: 026253617X

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A book that acts both as library and exhibition space, selecting, arranging, and housing texts and images, aligning itself with printed matter in the process. Fantasies of the Library lets readers experience the library anew. The book imagines, and enacts, the library as both keeper of books and curator of ideas—as a platform of the future. One essay occupies the right-hand page of a two-page spread while interviews scrolls independently on the left. Bibliophilic artworks intersect both throughout the book-as-exhibition. A photo essay, “Reading Rooms Reading Machines” further interrupts the book in order to display images of libraries (old and new, real and imagined), and readers (human and machine) and features work by artists including Kader Atta, Wafaa Bilal, Mark Dion, Rodney Graham, Katie Paterson, Veronika Spierenburg, and others. The book includes an essay on the institutional ordering principles of book collections; a conversation with the proprietors of the Prelinger Library in San Francisco; reflections on the role of cultural memory and the archive; and a dialogue with a new media theorist about experiments at the intersection of curatorial practice and open source ebooks. The reader emerges from this book-as-exhibition with the growing conviction that the library is not only a curatorial space but a bibliological imaginary, ripe for the exploration of consequential paginated affairs. The physicality of the book—and this book—“resists the digital,” argues coeditor Etienne Turpin, “but not in a nostalgic way.” Contributors Erin Kissane, Hammad Nasar, Megan Shaw Prelinger, Rick Prelinger, Anna-Sophie Springer, Charles Stankievech, Katharina Tauer, Etienne Turpin, Andrew Norman Wilson, Joanna Zylinska

Data Feminism
Data Feminism

Author: Catherine D'Ignazio

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2020-03-31

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 0262358530

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A new way of thinking about data science and data ethics that is informed by the ideas of intersectional feminism. Today, data science is a form of power. It has been used to expose injustice, improve health outcomes, and topple governments. But it has also been used to discriminate, police, and surveil. This potential for good, on the one hand, and harm, on the other, makes it essential to ask: Data science by whom? Data science for whom? Data science with whose interests in mind? The narratives around big data and data science are overwhelmingly white, male, and techno-heroic. In Data Feminism, Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren Klein present a new way of thinking about data science and data ethics—one that is informed by intersectional feminist thought. Illustrating data feminism in action, D'Ignazio and Klein show how challenges to the male/female binary can help challenge other hierarchical (and empirically wrong) classification systems. They explain how, for example, an understanding of emotion can expand our ideas about effective data visualization, and how the concept of invisible labor can expose the significant human efforts required by our automated systems. And they show why the data never, ever “speak for themselves.” Data Feminism offers strategies for data scientists seeking to learn how feminism can help them work toward justice, and for feminists who want to focus their efforts on the growing field of data science. But Data Feminism is about much more than gender. It is about power, about who has it and who doesn't, and about how those differentials of power can be challenged and changed.