Indexing It All

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In this work, Ronald Day presents a critical history of the modern tradition of documentation, emphasizing the documentary index as a mode of social positioning. Drawing on the insights of French documentalist Suzanne Briet, he investigates the evolution of indexicality, highlighting the shift from explicit professional structures that connected users to documents to implicit infrastructural devices in everyday information practices. Day identifies three epistemic eras in how individuals and groups are represented: through documents, information, and data. He analyzes five key cases in the modern documentation tradition, including the socio-technical instrumentalism of Paul Otlet, contrasting it with Martin Heidegger's hermeneutic perspective. He explores the transition from documentation to information science, which transformed individuals and texts into users and information. Additionally, Day examines social media's algorithmic practices that further subsume human agency, efforts to create android robots that reflect human agency within information systems, and the role of "big data" in neoliberal governance through indexing and analytics for surveillance. Ultimately, he reflects on the implications for critique and judgment in an era where individuals' rights to judgment are increasingly mediated and replaced by contemporary documentary techniques.