Documents/documentation

Abstract

Documentation – that is, documents and practices with them (or documentary practices) – plays a central role in constituting and materializing information. Bernd Frohmann (2004) argues that information is an effect of documentation. He argues that attention to documents and documentary practices “reveals how it is that particular documents, at particular times and places and in particular areas of the social and cultural terrain, become informative”. In order for a document to be considered a document, and consequently to be informing, the following properties should be present: materiality, institutionality, discipline, and historicity. [excerpt]