Sensing significant developments in one’s environment and seeking to influence others—becoming informed and informing others—are basic to survival. In human societies, these interactions are largely and increasingly achieved through documents. When we speak of a community knowing something, it commonly means that some of the individuals in a community know something. The ability to influence what is known within a group can have important political, economic, and practical consequences. What people know is a constituent part of their culture and knowing, believing, and understanding always occurs within a cultural context. In this way, information always has physical, mental, and social aspects that can never be fully separated.
All living creatures depend for survival on their ability to sense what is significant in their environment and to react appropriately. It may be a single-cell organism sensing and seeking moisture, a plant growing toward the light, an insect looking for food, or a mammal detecting a threatening predator. It might be a human engaged in intellectual debate. In every case, the living organism internally forms a perception. Well-being and even survival depend on accurate perception, but there is no guarantee that the organism has sensed accurately or interpreted correctly. There are, of course, many possible reactions depending on whether what is sensed is attractive (food, warmth, shelter, a potential mate) or a threat (a predator or other danger). Commonly there is an attempt to influence the perception of some other living organism through charm or deceit, but the attempt will not necessarily achieve its intended result.
These processes of sensing, perception, and reacting, and, also, seeking to influence the sensing, perception, and reacting of some other organism–becoming informed and informing others–are the basis of information in society. All communities, all societies, all collaborations arise through and depend on interaction and communication among members. This is evident among animals who interact through gestures and sounds. Prehistoric human societies used speech, dance, and gesture to communicate and drawings to record. What distinguishes humans from other animals is our greater complexity of language, images, and use of objects.
What do individuals do with documents? We use documents to communicate across space and time, and we seek documents in order to reduce our ignorance and for reassurance through verification. We document something by creating a record for our own purposes or for others, now or in the future. Our purpose may be aesthetic, when we read, view, write, draw, or perform for our own amusement, entertainment, spiritual or therapeutic purposes. We monitor our environment to sense what is happening around us and to us. We try to keep up or catch up with developments of interest to us, and we avoid or filter out what we cannot or do not want to deal with. These are individual acts, though possibly delegated to other individuals or machinery.
It can be convenient and useful to speak of what a community knows. There are many examples of communities with some specialized knowledge: the staff of a manufacturing company, a class of students, the residents of a village, officials in a government department, scholars in an academic discipline, and so on. Photographers know what f64 signifies, Czechs know about the Battle of the White Mountain in 1620, physicians know how to diagnose illnesses, Christians know that Christ died to redeem mankind, and so on. Individuals outside each community are unlikely to have such knowledge or might believe differently.
Strictly speaking, only an individual living creature can know something, and that knowing ends with that individual’s death. But since different people may have the same or very similar knowledge, perhaps learned from each other, what was known may remain known by others in the same community even as individuals die. A simple, superficial explanation is that any statement about the knowledge of a community is a generalization. It is a convenient way of describing what is known by all, by most, or, at least, by many individual members of a community. What they know may be significantly different from what all or most individuals in some other group know. This difference in knowledge is part of what makes the two groups different.
Attempts to determine what is known in a community (sometimes called domain analysis) are likely to be imprecise. It may not be clear who should be included in the community, and membership is often a matter of degree. Further, the notion of a community is deceptively simple. Social relationships include many sets of interpersonal relationships, and every individual is a member of many changing communities at any given time. Also, it may be hard to establish what an individual knows. My knowledge is partially evidenced by the records I keep. Records are shared by others within communities. Documents are useful in constituting a community and in facilitating the sharing of knowledge, but documents incompletely reflect what individuals know. The documents associated with a community may be more easily available than the individuals constituting the community, and it may well be more convenient to examine the documents instead of the people; but there is a risk in this, because it is an indirect and imperfect approach since documents are not people.
Nevertheless, what a group knows or believes can have important political, economic, and practical consequences. Understanding what is known in a community allows prediction of how the community is likely to react to new developments, its preparedness to cope with a disaster, its willingness to accept particular changes, and so on, so there are strong incentives to find out. As a result, ascertaining what is known can be very useful. Thus any ability to influence what a community knows is a significant source of power, and reflected in our list of agendas in chapter 1.
Statements in the form “the company knew ...” or “the United States knew ...” are usually figurative ways of stating that leaders of a company or of a country knew something even though the rest of that community might not. More complex explanations and an understanding of the mechanisms involved require attention to the role of culture.
The word culture is commonly used for “high culture,” such as opera, classical music, art exhibitions, and other elegant but expensive activities of elites. In academic discussion, however, culture has a different and broader meaning. It refers to how we live our daily lives. The classic definition is by Sir Edward Tylor in 1871: “Culture or civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” Later definitions tend to be similar. Important for our purposes is that, in this broad sense, what each of us knows is a significant component of our culture, along with how we speak and how we dress. Hence differences between groups in what is known and in how individuals communicate are cultural differences.
No individual can know everyone else in the world, every place, every institution, every building, and every event. We cannot attend to every media outlet or publication. Each of us knows a lot less than is in principle knowable. Instead, we have a limited circle of friends and family. We know, more or less, the neighborhood we live in, the routes we travel, and a work or school environment. Our personal world is a small world, even though it includes participation in multiple, different, overlapping communities.
Some small worlds seem, culturally, smaller than others—for example, if we live on an isolated island, as a prison inmate, or among the elderly in a nursing home. When we learn, we generally learn from the people around us (parents, siblings, friends, teachers, and colleagues), and we learn from the signs and documents present in our environment. In brief, our knowledge, modes of communication, and ways of reasoning are culturally situated in our personal small world, and even the smallest personal world is complex. We can illustrate the consequences of this situation by considering facts, since documents are concerned with evidence, and evidence implies facts.
Our knowledge, modes of communication, and ways of reasoning are culturally situated in our personal small world, and even the smallest personal world is complex.
The visionary schemes of Paul Otlet were noted above. His ideas were summarized in two books published in the mid-1930s. At the same time, in Poland, the microbiologist Ludwik Fleck was developing his explanation, in his Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (1935/1979), of why concise factual encyclopedia entries sought by Otlet were inherently inadequate. Fleck claimed that summarization becomes misleading when too much of the contextual explanation is left out. He argued that a text has to be understood in relation to three entities: the writer, the text, and the cultural habits and cultural context of the writer. And when a text is read, it is necessarily read with the cultural habits and cultural context of the reader. So there is, in effect, a double Fleck effect: not only the writer, the text, and the writer’s cultural context, but also the reader, the text, and the reader’s cultural context. Difficulties arise from differences between the two cultural contexts. We understand ancient, medieval, and renaissance authors with difficulty because the writer’s knowledge and ways of thinking are more or less different from ours. And those writers would have difficulties understanding our current writings because they would not be familiar with our modern world. Context matters!
Others besides Fleck have examined how knowledge evolves within communities, a field often called social epistemology. These include Maurice Halbwachs’ work on collective memory (also known as social memory), Michel Foucault’s archeology of knowledge, Thomas Kuhn’s notions of scientific revolutions and of paradigm shifts, as well as quantitative analyses of the surface phenomena of document-related behavior (bibliometrics).
An important area is our understanding of past events. Here it is helpful to distinguish between the past, history, and heritage. The past (what happened) has passed. It is gone and it is inaccessible. We cannot go there. History, as the word itself implies, is story, narrative claims about the past, that are always descriptive and interpretative, always accounts that are necessarily incomplete and from some point of view. Heritage is what we retain from or about the past: our genes, toxic wastes, treasured documents, and preferred historical narratives.
Historical knowledge is an interesting case, because it is so obvious that we are separated from past events and because the significance of traces of the past (old documents, archeological finds, fallible memories) so clearly depend on our interpretations of them. Other areas of knowledge tend to share, in varying degrees, the same attributes: inaccessibility of the object of interest, dependence on interpretation, and, in all cases, interpretations are made within cultural contexts.
Different scholars commonly work on the same topic, or on very closely related topics, at the same time, but not in the same place. When that happens, it would be helpful to come together and share the same space, which would make communication, consultation, and the sharing of notes both convenient and efficient. But a shared workspace is unlikely to be practical for many reasons, even if economic and institutional constraints could be overcome. The other person may be unwilling or unable to move to my space. Even if a prospective collaborator did move into my working area, this approach does not scale, because there may be any number of other prospective collaborators and each of them may want shared space with yet other collaborators who might not be of interest to me. Also, tomorrow I may become more interested in another, different topic and so I want to share my space with some other, different collaborator and, perhaps yet another, different topic and scholar the following day.
There are other difficulties. Even if we know that another scholar shares our interest, we may not know where he is, we may not share a common language, and, in addition to distance as a problem, there is also time. That other scholar may have lost interest in my topic by now. He or she might have died.
As a practical matter, we commune with other scholars through their documents. We deal as best we can with what they wrote and what has been written about their work. Documents become all that survive as means for engaging with that person’s ideas and work. Just as our technology incorporates achievements of past inventors, in a similar way we can say that documents embody, selectively and imperfectly, the work and ideas of earlier scholars.
Documents are widely and rightly seen as social, as is reflected in writings on “the social life” of documents and in documents being defined as “social objects.” The social role of documents was stressed in our first chapter. But the use of documents can be strictly private and personal, as in the case of a private diary, reading for our own enjoyment, or making private personal notes of some sort that are not intended for other individuals to see and who might not understand them if they did. Describing documents as social objects is not wrong, but it is incomplete. This could be remedied by changing “social objects” to “cultural objects,” since “cultural” includes both individual and group behavior.
Society is composed of individuals and, to be precise, it is individuals, not societies, that interact with documents, even though some processes may be delegated to machines. It is individuals who create documents to achieve some end and whose perceptions and misperceptions of documents have cognitive and emotional consequences. Two or more individuals may well collaborate in the creation or revision of documents, and two or more individuals might react to a document in the same way, but they are still individuals. Nevertheless, the individual use of documents is ordinarily social because it is cultural, and we are, or should be, concerned with who originated and who may see any document.
It will be clear by now that information has physical, mental, and social aspects. Here, we review these three dimensions and note some relationships between them.
A document is something regarded by someone as signifying something. It has to be a physical, material entity unless and until we want to expand into extrasensory perception, direct divine inspiration, or telepathy. It is sometimes assumed or implied that electronic records (“the virtual”) are somehow not physical, but this is an error because electronic systems are physical. They do not achieve much without, for example, magnetic charges or electrical power.
One can discuss a text or a work in an abstract sense, but texts and works can exist as documents only in some physical manifestation. Information systems are supposed to inform people, but this is always and only through physical stuff. All engineered information systems operate on physical records, whether print on paper, holes in a punch card, magnetized bits, optical pulses, or other physical media.
The physical aspect means that all documents exist in space and time. The spatial aspect means that all documents occupy physical space somewhere, and anything existing in physical space can, in principle, be moved to a new location, though ease of mobility varies greatly. The temporal aspect of documents is also important. It may take time to read a text or hear a recording. Some kinds of documents are designed to change over time, for example movies and other performances.
And, as time passes, anything physical will eventually change, making stability and preservation important practical issues. An extreme case is the vulnerability of electronic records to loss or corruption. The history of document technology—writing, printing, telecommunications, copying—can be seen as a continuing effort to reduce the constraints of time and place.
The physical dimension is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for being a document. Someone must view it as signifying (or potentially signifying) something, even if they are unsure of what the significance might be. Suzanne Briet, in her explanation of documents and documentation, stated that a document constitutes evidence: “A document is proof in support of a fact” (1951/2006, 9). Her original used the French word preuve, which corresponds to the English proof, but can also refer to testimony and evidence.
Status as a document (as actually or potentially evidence of something) is an individual, personal mental judgment and, therefore, subjective. Such a perception occurs only in a living mind and, with any living, learning mind, the perception can change when what the individual knows changes, as it does continually until death. Although the consequences of this perception might be observable, the perception itself is neither observable nor measurable.
The adjective “social” is widely used in relation to documents. We read about “the social life of documents” (e.g., Brown and Duguid 2000) or of documents as “social traces” (e.g., Ferraris 2013). But if we assume that only an individual can be informed by a document (through a mental construction), then caution is needed to distinguish the social from the mental. If we set aside the use of social when used figuratively to denote a multiplicity of individuals engaged in subjective mental activity as belonging more properly to the mental aspect, the social can include the sociology of knowledge, especially interactions between two or more different individuals influencing each other in their understanding of reality.
In their The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (1966), Berger and Luckmann provide a detailed explanation of how the subjective can be made objective, and thereby accessible to others, through an expression (a frown), a gesture (with a dagger), or a conversation. They rightly emphasize the power of language, but in doing so an opportunity was lost in what could have been added. Language, a most important ingredient in communication, is largely and increasingly expressed in documents. Had that point been made, the study of documents and of documentation might have received much more attention in the past half-century.
A central concept in the sociology of knowledge is intersubjectivity. An individual can make a subjective idea objectively perceptible by others. For example, a hostile attitude may be made objective by a frown, by the threatening use of a weapon, or by using angry words, to another individual, who then makes a subjective interpretation and reacts and responds accordingly. In this way, subjective understandings develop among two or more individuals in a related, dialectic way. These more or less shared subjective understandings–intersubjective understandings—form the basis of the shared culture of any social group. These are still individual subjective understandings, but they become shared, and are in that sense social.
The social dimension is reflected in collaborative actions, such as teamwork and coercion. The multiplicity, complexity, and fluidity of social groupings should be noted.
All communities depend on the division of labor, resulting in a social division of specialized knowledge and, increasingly, members’ dependence on secondhand knowledge. It is the rise of physical documentary techniques such as writing, printing, telecommunications, copying, and computing that has enabled the social division of labor and what is ordinarily meant by “information society.”
It is the rise of physical documentary techniques such as writing, printing, telecommunications, copying, and computing that has enabled the social division of labor and what is ordinarily meant by “information society.”
A text may be authored through the mental efforts of a solitary individual, but physical documents are ordinarily the result of the actions of many different people. A printed book depends on paper manufacturers, printers, publishers, typesetters, binders, book retailers, and many others. Shared financial, transportation, and other infrastructures support all of their varied contributions, and a book would not be printed in the absence of readers.
The social and the physical combine in ways that involve the mental dimension less directly in the area of information policy in which social powers are used to enable or, commonly, to restrict mental activity through economic, legislative, political, and other means. Examples include the regulations governing intellectual property, textbook adoption, privacy, libel, technical standards, and national security. These affordances influence mental activity indirectly by influencing the opportunities.
Behavior derives from both nature and nurture. Our mental behavior is profoundly influenced by nurture, by what we learn directly or indirectly from others. Nurture is a social process. Our culture and cultural heritage are socially derived. As Fleck emphasized, understanding a written text requires taking into account the writer’s cultural context. In terms of our present discussion, a document must have both physical and mental properties, but since the mental processes are culturally entangled with the social, the status of being a document necessarily also entails a social dimension indirectly through the mental. This alone is sufficient justification for believing every document must necessarily have a social angle as well as mental and physical angles.
We have so far focused on pairs of dimensions, but it can be noticed that the third dimension sooner or later emerges as implicated. We use, and need to use, documents to aid, to persuade, to control, and in many other ways, and in doing so the three angles—the social, the physical and the mental—are all directly in use.
Individuals use documents in varied ways: to learn, verify, communicate, record, enjoy, monitor, and avoid what they do not want. Much of our interaction with others is through messages and other documents. How we use them and how we understand them are parts of our culture. We each live in small but complex worlds, and our writing, reading, and understanding all occur within our cultural contexts; even facts need to be understood in context.
In the next chapter, we look at how documents are organized through arrangement and description.