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

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

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.