Category Archives: Document

Documents and Moral Knowledge

by Tim Gorichanaz Document, Sociopolitical issues

I’ve finally finished my PhD work, and I can rededicate myself to blogging (more) regularly and taking ScratchTap in new directions. This fall, I’ll be presenting a paper on documents and moral knowledge at the Annual Meeting of the Document Academy. Here’s a snippet of what I’m thinking about.

Documents have traditionally been conceptualized as representations of reality. As such, we know a lot about how they show and afford facts about the world. Recently, scholars have been exploring how documents can also construct reality. With this view, we can begin to think about how documents show and afford moral knowledge, or knowledge about what people ought to value in the world and how people ought to act. In this realm, much of the discussion centers around texts, such as works of fiction. Reading Crime and Punishment, for example, is a great way to build your moral imagination.

But what about visual art? I’d like to consider two works of art depicting Yellowstone National Park, one from the 19th century and another from the 21st. By analyzing these works as documents, we can see how art played and continues to play a decisive role in how Americans conceptualize and value the wilderness—perhaps even more than scientific documents.

The first document is a painting done in 1871 by Thomas Moran depicting the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. The work was done while Moran was a guest artist on a geographic survey. Moran’s work showed the beauty and scale of the Yellowstone region more effectively than other descriptions, such that Moran’s work was decisive in the United States passing the National Parks Act in 1872, forming Yellowstone National Park and setting the stage for other regions in the United States—and other countries—to be preserved as national parks.

The second document is a 2014 photograph by Michael Nichols, depicting three bison at Yellowstone National Park being photographed by a group of people near their automobiles. Nichols’ work was part of a National Geographic project documenting Yellowstone National Park which sought to expose the tension between the park’s existence as a wildlife preserve and a site for human enjoyment.

Both of these works respond to a dualism in the human relationship to the wilderness, dating back at least to the European colonization of America. On one hand, (1) we see the wilderness as a store of commodities to be profited from; and on the other, (2) we see the wilderness as a dangerous, chaotic blur that defies comprehension. Thus the U.S. National Parks are at once “for the benefit and enjoyment of the people,” and also a preserve of nature and wildlife for its own sake.

In their artworks, both Moran and Nichols seem to reject (1), but they do so in different ways: Moran does so by depicting (2), while Nichols does so by holding up a mirror to (1).
If we think of the purpose of these documents as providing moral knowledge, we can ask which approach is more effective. Moran’s work had the almost immediate effect of the creation of the U.S. National Parks. Nichols’ work cannot yet boast any such effects. Of course, many other factors complicate this picture: today’s media climate, the saturation of images, the nature of internet communication…

Still, the question should give us pause. The wilderness is disappearing, if it has not already gone. Indeed, the world itself is in grave danger, as climate change unfurls. In discourse around these topics, we have tended to appeal to scientific documents. But if artistic documents can provision the sort of moral knowledge necessary to heal our relationship to the world, then perhaps we can also appeal to art. If that is the case, then it is worth thinking about what sort of art will serve best.

From register to blockchain

by Tim Gorichanaz Document, History, Technology
Stationers’ Register entry for Arden of Faversham, from Shakespeare Documented

In the early days of print, the Stationers’ Company in London had a monopoly on publishing. The guild created a register (the Stationers’ Register) that documented publishers’ rights to produce particular printed works. This served as a way to check the authenticity of printed works in a time when unauthorized copies were beginning to proliferate—if they didn’t correspond to the line in the register, they were probably illicit. (“Probably,” because, in practice, not all works were duly registered.)

The system worked well enough for some time, though there were some problems. As Adrian Johns writes in Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates, the Crown could supervene the register by way of royal patent—and so the systems of register and patent sometimes were at odds.

Other things that limited the register’s usefulness: It only existed in one place, so it was in practice difficult and costly for people to confirm its contents. And moreover, it was controlled by the Stationers’ Company, and so it could only be trusted to the extent that the company was trusted.

So much for early modernity. As Johns chronicles, concerns about piracy exploded since the time of the Stationers’ Register. And now that we have digital assets, which in principle can be reproduced infinitely, it’s as big an issue as ever.

For any document or piece of information, we need a way to determine whether we can trust it. This stands for both the legitimacy of the document’s production and distribution (as in say, currency and digital music) and its content (as in news stories).

The invention of print led to new forms of and urgency regarding piracy, and the register was one method of dealing with it. Now, with the world wide web, we are seeing this again. And to deal with contemporary piracy (among other issues related to information trust), we’re seeing the rise of a new technology: blockchain.

Blockchain is one of the world’s most exciting new technologies. As the internet revolutionized information sharing and communications, blockchain has the capacity to revolutionize the economy and many of our social systems. You’ve probably heard of bitcoin, which is the first platform built on blockchain technology, and in the coming decades you’re sure to hear of many more. Experts are likening the situation with blockchain to that of the internet protocol, which was invented in the 1970s but didn’t burst through the popular realm until the 1990s—in those terms, some say we’re in 1992.

In brief, a blockchain is a distributed ledger used to record transactions in a verifiable and inalterable way. As described in The Economist‘s briefing, blockchain “is a way of making and preserving truths.” The blockchain is something everyone can refer to, to determine who owns what and where it came from. This goes for digital goods as much as physical ones—the blockchain prevents digital things from being reproduced infinitely. Importantly, when we compare it to the Stationers’ Register, it can be checked for practically no cost, and it doesn’t rely on an external authority as a grounds for trust.

Blockchain is sure to turn any number of industries upside down. If it relies on documentation, change is in the air. The question, though, is in the details. For a smattering, you can check out:

Writing, memory and freedom

by Tim Gorichanaz Document, Information, Technology
Is this memory?

One of the reasons we write things down is to help us remember. That seems clear; I don’t want to forget your phone number or what I was supposed to get from the grocery store, so I write it down.

Some ancient philosophers worried that writing would wipe away our capacity for organically remembering things. Even today, writers such as Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, make analogous arguments.

But those worries seem secondary to the problem that writing (and information systems generally) creates the sense that all memories have been recorded and are retrievable.

First of all, this is an illusion. It is impossible to record everything, and gaps are inevitable. Frighteningly, we may not notice when things are missing, and we fill in the gaps through inference. We know this in everyday life as “jumping to conclusions.” The idea that we think we can record everything seems to come from the 20th-century enchantment with computing, whose metaphors have permeated many aspects of life.

Psychologist Arthur Glenberg argues against this position in his 1997 paper What Memory is For. The idea of total recall—that our brains are recording everything we ever experience but that it’s locked away and can be coaxed out through psychotherapy—is a myth, Glenberg argues. Rather, Glenberg advances a view of memory as a facilitator of action in our environments, and something that is not totally accurate (and shouldn’t be!). More recently, Julia Shaw makes similar points in her book The Memory Illusion, in which she goes over many ways that our memories can betray us. The pernicious thing is not when we forget—it’s when we misremember things and think we’re correct. You can watch an animated abstract for The Memory Illusion here:

Second, remembering may not always be the best thing. Also in 1997, Geof Bowker published a paper on the importance of organizational forgetting. Organizations need to manage a lot of information and knowledge. Normally we think of this only in terms of remembering, but organizations also need to think about forgetting—especially that which no longer serves.

In the everyday lives of individuals, too, memories can sometimes be straightjackets. Sure, it’s easy to argue that forgetting an unpleasant memory could be problematic, but the ability to forget aspects of one’s past is also important for moving forward.

Modern technology has made this so much more complicated. Consider, for example, that you once had an abusive lover. You’ve since broken up, but remembering that person feels more painful than helpful. In the days of yore, you could simply burn all the photographs of the two of you and that would be that. But today, traces of your past relationship may be strewn about Facebook forever. For another sort of example, the work of Oliver Haimson on the intersection of gender transition and social media also presents a fascinating case.

The point is, the (im)possibility of forgetting becomes a crucial ethical issue today. Philosopher Luciano Floridi writes in The Ethics of Information:

Recorded memories tend to freeze the nature of their subject. The more memories we accumulate and externalize, the more narrative constraints we provide for the construction and development of personal identities. Increasing our memories also means decreasing the degree of freedom we might enjoy in defining ourselves. Forgetting is also a self-poietic [creative] art… Capturing, editing, saving, conserving, and managing one’s own memories for personal and public consumption will become increasingly important not just in terms of protection of informational privacy… but also in terms of a morally healthy construction of one’s personal identity.

We should remember that memory slips are not all bad—both mental forgetting and missing written information. And we should also be more humble about what we do “remember,” because it may very well be wrong.