A new Biographical Directory of Documentation and Information Science (https://asist.a2hosted.com) has been created under the auspices of the Association for Information Science and Technology Special Interest Group in the History and Foundations of Information Science, using wiki-style presentation. It rescued, updated, and extended the “Pioneers of Information Science” webpages created by the late Robert V. Williams in the 1990s. The historical background, technical decisions, and policy options are summarized.
Documents can be understood as containers for information that enable remote communication between people across space and time. They are therefore fundamentally subject to issues of trust. The theoretical treatment of documents as a means of remote communication has a long history and has arrived in the age of electronic document exchange, as shown by the work of R. T. Pédauque, which is taken as a starting point here.
The article discusses two traditions of documentality: that of social ontology and that of neo-documentation, and it contains an appendix on artificial intelligence.
This paper is an exposition of the documental being, becoming, and unbecoming of hair, wherein I argue that although human hair is a corporeal material, and an object that can be viewed through various perspectives and theories, it can also be read as a document imbued with meaning, intention, and perception by humans, and fulfills Suzanne Briet’s criteria (Briet, 2006; Buckland, 1997) for an object to be considered a document: it has materiality (it must be a physical thing), intentionality (intended as evidence), needs processing (to be made part of a documentary system), and is an object of phenomenological perception (recognized as a document by humans).
As the Indonesian government advances digital document management through the SRIKANDI system, challenges persist regarding fragmented and subjective classification practices. This study proposes the integration of Natural Language Processing (NLP)-based classification within SRIKANDI to enhance consistency, transparency, and accountability in document management. Framed by an interdisciplinary theoretical foundation, the study synthesizes Michael Buckland’s document theory, viewing documents as dynamic social evidence, with Michel Foucault’s theory of power, highlighting classification as an exercise of institutional authority, and NLP methodologies that enable automated, content-driven categorization. The study positions documents as both technological artifacts and political constructs, whose classification practices simultaneously structure meaning and reinforce power relations. To assess the feasibility and implications of this proposed integration, the research adopts a qualitative approach, employing a case study of the SRIKANDI platform complemented by in-depth collection and analysis of practitioner feedback. Critical analysis reveals that classification systems risk reproducing institutional hierarchies if epistemological and political dimensions are not explicitly addressed. This study invites practitioners to evaluate the proposed NLP-enhanced system, offering reflections on its technical utility, potential biases, and impact on bureaucratic transparency. The insights gathered aim to inform the future development of more equitable, accountable, and semantically robust governmental information systems.
The rise of abstracting services in the 20th century is usually associated with the explosion of original scientific research and its attendant journal literature. The abstract was a tool of information dissemination and access for increasingly expansive and international work. What is often overlooked, however, is the correlation between original research and the technologies that made these advances available. Scientific apparatuses were, however, documented from the beginning, and were also a part of the rise of abstract literature in the 19th and 20th centuries. In this paper I examine the development of abstracts for apparatuses and patents in the chemistry literature during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, especially in English and German language publications.
As we age, our relationship with our personal archive evolves as we experience cognitive shifts. This is even more so if we experience a reality that is shaped by Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI is increasingly managing personal information through automated curation and personalized AI software interactions tailored to users (Hayes and Downie, 2024), sometimes completely unbeknownst to users. Meanwhile, AI-driven automated curation is also helping older adults manage their archives, influencing their ability to maintain agency over their life documentation practices. Older adults use a variety of health-monitoring technologies, such as the Apple Watch, the Samsung Smartwatch, and the Fitbit. These devices incorporate AI systems that analyze physiological patterns to predict potential health risks. These technologies are prompting individuals to have less direct control over their health records and their validity, making older adults one of the most vulnerable and exposed populations due to the intergenerational digital divide and declining digital dexterity. This also raises the issue of digital ageism in AI Systems (Loveys et al., 2022), where AI models are trained on biased datasets to reinforce stereotypes about aging, affecting how older adults' personal information is kept and presented.
Generative Artificial Intelligences (AIs) and current advanced large language models (LLMs) are algorithmically designed to generate text-based conversations as conversational agents (CAs), by replicating human language and conversational communication. Pairing human cognition with generative computationally coded cognition. We have never been here before: cerebral and artificial information collaborations and processing producing expressions that may or may not become visible as second-hand/secondary source documents.
This paper examines the Monas diorama as a central apparatus in Indonesia’s politics of remembering, whose narrative consolidation during the New Order rendered it a state-authored monument of national memory. Drawing on Foucault’s distinction between monument and document, Ferraris’s ontology of documentality, and Perret’s concept of document design as projective epistemology, the study reframes the diorama as a documentary assemblage shaped by inscription, power, and institutionalized forgetting. Through diachronic, synchronic, comparative, and experimental analyses, the paper diagnoses failures across the physical, social, and cognitive dimensions of Monas as a document, revealing narrative authoritarianism, representational rigidity, and the absence of plural historical voices. Building on this diagnosis, the paper proposes a conceptual redesign of the diorama as an augmented living document through AR/VR-enabled re-inscription. This proposal is not an account of an existing implementation but a design-driven intervention aimed at reopening the multiplicity of suppressed traces, particularly those surrounding Reformasi and alternative civic memories. By positioning AR/VR as a medium of democratic re-documentation, the study argues that national monuments can transition from instruments of state pedagogy into dialogic platforms where collective memory becomes participatory, interpretive, and critically negotiated.
This paper outlines an agenda for examining the passport in its emergence in the United States. In the earliest U.S. passports, there is already a paradox that mirrors American liberal democracy itself—a nation founded, in Thomas Jefferson’s words, in the vision of an “empire of liberty.” It lays the groundwork for working through the concept of and processes associated with documentality and what documents do, as well as for understanding the extraordinary conditions and implications associated with the inscription of human lives into documentary systems. Studying the emergence of passports within a broader documentary regime of American surveillance and capture helps to understand how the U.S. passport functions in the present.
This article explores the emerging materialities of mediating artifacts in the field of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). Drawing on the evolution of documentary environments and the growing hybridization of digital and physical spaces, it extends documentary and communication theories to robots taking into account their socio-technical dimension and their info-communicational implications for human interactions. It posits that examining the robot as a mediating artefact of a documentary nature can enhance both the understanding and the design of collaborative logic in HRI. Using Manuel Zacklad's theoretical framework, Documents for Action (DoPA), the research conceptualizes the robot as a semiotic and mediating document integrated into collective and collaborative practices. It analyzes robots-“dispositifs” through three interdependent processes—documentarization, editorialization, and redocumentarization—and offers initial reflections on the design of information and communication dispositifs that include mediating artifacts of a new complexity, as well as on the evolution of the theoretical apparatus.
This international study examines the use of AI tools provided through university-issued platforms in the US and Canada. The authors aim to discover how embedded AI tools in the university workplace affect the daily creation of personal documents within their digital workspaces. Using University-Issued Tools, such as Outlook, Teams, and all other Microsoft Suite Products, this study places a hyperfocus on time, efficiency, accuracy, usability, functionality, and how the embedded nature of AI tools facilitates working conditions, functions, intentionality, and purpose.
The paper examines the claim that new developments in document theory, sometimes referred to as “neodocumentalism,” constitute a radical challenge to orthodox information science theory. Related terminology is clarified and the disparate language needs of information practice and information theory are identified. The use of metaphor and figurative language is beneficial for practice, but detrimental for theory development. Finally, two linear models of documentary activity (reading and writing; reception and expression) are shown to form a single unified model.
Museums increasingly adopt interactive technologies such as gamification to communicate complex historical and cultural messages in ways that are accessible to the public. In response to the growing need for more engaging and inclusive cultural education, the National Museum of Indonesia has introduced Paras Nusantara, an innovative program that merges artificial intelligence (AI) with historical portraiture to foster public awareness of Indonesia’s rich ethnic diversity. "Paras Nusantara," which translates to "Faces of the Archipelago," utilizes AI-driven facial recognition to match visitors’ facial features with one of 78 ethnographic portraits created by artist Raden Mas Pirngadie in 1935. By transforming traditional museum collections into interactive digital experiences, Paras Nusantara provides a compelling example of how technology can simplify complex cultural messages and make them accessible to a broader audience. This initiative not only highlights Indonesia’s pluralistic identity but also invites visitors, especially younger generations, to engage more deeply with their heritage through the lens of technology and storytelling.
This paper maps the theoretical and practical challenges of preserving AI-generated content (AIGC) and proposes a coordinated research agenda rather than policy prescriptions. AIGC reveals the networked, processual nature of cultural production, challenging assumptions about human authorship, singular intentionality, and linear transmission. We identify forces that dissolve boundaries—indistinguishability, distributed intentionality, and recursive training loops—examine legal patchworks across jurisdictions, and consider evolving social perceptions that shape cultural recognition. Extending document theory toward evaluation that gives priority to function and drawing on social ontology, we argue that preservation and recognition are mutually constitutive. We outline a coordinated agenda across three fronts: theoretical (models of distributed agency, accounts of extended intentionality, and ethical justification that balances cultural continuity with environmental cost); empirical (ethnographies of human–AI collaboration, longitudinal studies of recognition, and assessments of preservation impact); and technical (metadata with detailed provenance, verification when origins are uncertain or missing, and adaptive selection and sampling, including the preservation of models). We conclude that preservation must expand from storing artifacts to documenting processes and relationships.
We propose that document engagements are palimpsestuous - meaning emerges through layered interactions between viewers and documents rather than inhering within documents themselves. A photograph of a coffee mug prompts the question "Who's Blake?" for one viewer while evoking decades of family ritual, community relationships, and funeral flowers in ice cream containers for another. Traditional cataloging systems capture surface-level nouns (coffee mug, ice cream parlor) while systematically excluding the epidata and proximity relationships where meaning lives.
This paper explores self-documentation as a social instrument for surviving misrecognition and constructing situated forms of care. Drawing from Foucault’s Lives of Infamous Men, it examines how lives become visible only when touched by power, through brief administrative inscriptions. Building on Documental Fixity (Sanches and Day, 2020), the argument shifts from the stabilizing power of documents to the anticipatory actions of those who know they are read. Rather than asking what a document is, I treat “document” as a modeling frame imposed upon things to manage indexicality. From passports to school uniforms, documentation organizes visibility and authority. In racialized and unequal contexts, subjects actively create their own documentary traces to be read otherwise. I name this anticipatory subject homodocumentum. The analysis proposes double indexicality—the simultaneous condition of being read and rewriting oneself—as a framework for understanding how people transform documentary infrastructures into means of collective agency. The paper concludes with reflections on theatre as a site of self-documentation and health production in Brazilian peripheries.
The permanent exhibitions at the the National Museum of Psychology at The University of Akron, Ohio, USA, are arranged into three strands that tell a history of American psychology: the profession, the science, and the agent of social change. Visitors see historical objects and archival documents exploring such topics as the history of mental wellness treatment, immigration intelligence testing, study of behavior, gender identity, authority, sensory perceptions, animal studies, sensations, and violence. Before leaving the museum, visitors are invited to reflect on what they learned by responding to the following prompt by writing on a note card and leaving it in the exhibit: What makes us human? Since the museum opened in 2018, visitors have submitted over 3,000 responses to the exhibit.
In this paper, the authors engaged in a structured exploration based on their personal experiences and professional expertise. Together they examine how AI impacts personal and collective memory, preservation efforts, and the ethical concerns around personal archives. As GenAI becomes more accessible to anyone with digital online access, new questions arise about the authenticity, continuity, and transformation of our documents. The questions we asked of ourselves and each other are: How has AI changed our understanding of the authenticity of the documents in our personal and family archives? Do AI-generated narratives and images enhance or distort our family and collective memories? At the core of our exploration is our concern about the authenticity and sustainability of family memory in the digital age. While focusing on how AI-generated images and narratives can affect intergenerational knowledge transfer, specifically how different generations approach personal documentation and memory work, and what role AI plays (if any) in shaping these approaches, especially in light of creating, maintaining, or accessing personal and family archives, for “private memory traces inside human brains are prosthetically augmented by publicly accessible documents and associated document technologies” (Rivera, 2021). Drawing on the work of Schmidt and Muehlfeld (2017) on intergenerational knowledge transfer and the preservation versus transformation dilemma (Lischer-Katz, 2022), the authors further examine how AI technologies impact documentation, while also considering ethical dilemmas of authenticity, bias, and ownership in AI-mediated archival practices (Hanna et al., 2024).
This position paper takes Niels’ Lund concept of doceme and applies it to an analysis of a contemporary information retrieval system for Wikipedia, constructed using the Vector Database system “Upstash Vector.” It begins with a theoretical analysis of the capacity for machine learning models to comprehend language, situating its position within that wide debate. It proceeds to discuss issues between the use of the term “semantic” in an data science vs. information science context. Finally, it applies theories from Lund’s doceme and Ron Day’s Documentarity to an analysis of the Upstash Vector dataset located on hugging face, closing with a qualitative reflection on what such systems indicate for the future of documentation.
