Ronald E. Day – författare

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.

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.

Rethinking Knowledge Management: From Knowledge Objects to Knowledge Processes readdresses fundamental issues in knowledge management, leading to a new area of study: knowledge processes. These integrate research across a variety of fields, thus reasserting the fundamental insights of knowledge management in organizations and societies. Knowledge processes go far beyond traditional information acquisition and processing by stressing the importance and creative potential of human expression, communication, and learning for successful economic planning and meaningful personal and social existence.

McInerney’s and Day’s superb authors from various disciplines offer new and exciting views on knowledge acquisition, generation, sharing and management in a post-industrial environment. Their contributions discuss problems of knowledge acquisition, handling, and learning from a variety of perspectives. Rather than the traditional notion of stores of knowledge that we hold in our mind, the view presented in this book is that of a constantly changing notion of what we know, of feelings related to that knowledge, and of a more holistic understanding of the act of knowing.