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

I ndexing It All investigates ‘aboutness’ or evidence in modern documentation, information science and data science (which together I call the ‘modern documentary tradition’) and how this occurs through technological and ideological mediation. The book is particularly concerned with describing the modern documentary mediation of human subjectivity as a type of social positioning theory. I had at least six intentions when I wrote Indexing It All. The first was formal: in an age of journal articles, web articles, books with chapters by different authors and multimedia materials, I wanted to see what could still be done with the organic form of the single-authored monograph. This dovetailed nicely, too, with the Hegelian dialectical structure of the book, since Hegel’s philosophy is in the form of historical stories. Second, I consciously chose to write a historical story made up of concepts in order to create understanding, rather than explanation alone. Many historical works, not least in information science, take the historiographic form of appearing to be ‘historical information’ – i.e., a narrative that represents historical facts. But anyone who has written such works will attest that historical works are also stories. This is to say that they try and probe and illustrate an instance or understanding of experience. This is what I was trying to do through writing a historical story made of concepts. (Note that the equivalent for the English word ‘history’ in many Western European languages can also mean ‘story.’) An Afterword to Indexing It All: The Subject in the Age of Documentation, Information, and Data by Ronald E. Day