Category Archives: Document

Documenting the self

by Tim Gorichanaz Document, Sociopolitical issues, Technology

I’ve been hard at work on my dissertation proposal—I’m studying the processes of artistic self-portraiture—and I’ve been thinking about self-documentation. In modern society we seem to be compelled to write about ourselves. We make resumes and CVs, and we write bios for our social media profiles, which are becoming central for everything from everyday communication to dating and business. There are, of course, also many non-verbal ways in which we document ourselves, which is a focus of my dissertation.

The later work of Michel Foucault suggests that self-documentation is not new. On the contrary, many in Ancient Greece and Rome apparently kept hupomnēmata, or notebooks “to collect what one has managed to hear or read, and for a purpose that is nothing less than the shaping of the self.” These were fragmentary notebooks, but their result was not merely a collection of disjointed scraps; rather, they contributed to a new whole, along with the writer themselves. According to Foucault, the purpose of the hupomnēmata was to care for the self, which was an ancient directive. (Foucault laments that today we only recall know thyself, having forgotten about care for thyself.) As Foucault writes, “writing transforms the things seen or heard ‘into tissue and blood.’” People regularly returned to their hupomnēmata for nourishment.

The function of the hupomnēmata is quite different from the modern genre of autobiography, whose purpose is not to care for the self but to care for others. Autobiographies and many other self-documents are packaged for sale (in various senses), but the hupomnēmata were intensely private. They were more about the process than the product.

Today, some of us keep hupomnēmata. Mine, if you could call it that, is in Evernote. But I think this is a rare practice. On the other hand, many people cultivate something like hupomnēmata in their social media feeds. A Twitter feed, for instance, presents a seemingly disjointed collection of thoughts and snippets from the world, and it seems to be both like and unlike hupomnēmata. On Twitter (and other social media, or even ICT-made self-documents in general), are posts revisited as a means of self-care? Is the primary audience the self or another?

Feeling the texture of text

by Tim Gorichanaz Document, Information
Cross-stitched book sculpture by Lauren DiCioccio

The word text and the word textile have a shared Latin origin. This is readily apparent, but still it begs the question: What do texts have to do with textiles?

The word text comes to us from the Latin textus (via the Old French texte). In Classical Latin, textus referred to the construction of a linguistic work; in Medieval Latin, it had come to refer to written treatises or, more specifically, Scripture. The term textus, in turn, came from the word texō, meaning “I weave.” Textile, then, refers to a literal weaving of cloth and other materials, whereas text refers to a metaphorical weaving. Also related is the word texture, which refers to the quality of a weaving—I can talk about the texture of an argument or the texture of a tapestry.

But a text is never really just a metaphorical weaving. It is, always, also, a literal weaving of material and idea. We don’t always seem to appreciate this. For instance, we likely consider two different copies of a book to have the same text, even if they are different editions. However, a text must be written—otherwise it would just be a series of words or an idea. Therefore, the writtenness of a text must have something to do with its meaning.

This was the insight behind the Texts and Textiles conference in 2012 at the Centre for Material Texts at Cambridge. (Wish I could have gone!) This conference celebrates the meaning that materials contribute to texts (as, I must meantion, does the Document Academy on an ongoing basis, for those who are interested).

Still, our tendency to ignore the material side of texts is unignorable and worth exploring.

I’m not sure the extent to which this aspect of our view of texts is modern or new, but if it is, then the work of Michael Heim may shed some insight on the matter. In his book Electric Language: A Philosophical Study of Word Processing, first published in 1987, Heim writes:

In the psychic framework of word processing, text is increasingly experienced as data. … As the writer or reader now controls the search process through a logically determined program, certain random and intuitive kinds of reading and consulting will no longer be possible in referencing procedures. … What one accesses on line will tend to be precisely what one is looking for—always filtered in advance by the terms of Boolean logic.

Ron Day, in his book Indexing It All, makes similar observations: He discusses how the concept of document has been eviscerated and fragmented as the modern concept of information.

In essence, the motto of information systems seems to go: “If you want to be more successful in giving people what they ask for, then limit what they can ask for.” Soon people come to ask for only what they know they can get… and this provides the grounding for two big information-age issues we’re facing today: filter bubbles and fake news. Overcoming these phenomena, it seems to me, requires that we remember how to feel the texture of text.

Scriptum est

by Tim Gorichanaz Document

Time and the written word have a curious relationship. In order to read something, we must have the written word at hand in the present, but the words must have been written in the past.

This might occur to you when you’re reading a historical document, say, or when you happen across one of your old notebooks. But it characterizes every interaction with the written word that we ever come across. Even online—though the temporal gap is certainly closing in some online forums; though they might purport to be “live,” there is still some delay. And generally, we don’t notice it. This was the theme of an article I wrote in 2016, “Documents and Time,” but there’s much more richness to plumb.

Lately I’ve been reading Vesa Suominen‘s book About and On Behalf of Scriptum Est, which is a philosophical book about librarianship. Suominen criticizes the majority viewpoint that libraries trade in “information,” arguing instead that libraries deal in documents. Of course, Suominen is not alone; there is a growing constituency of scholars championing the document perspective. But Suominen takes this further, proposing a new concept: scriptum est.

Scriptum est is Latin for “it is written.” As Suominen explains, the adoption of this term is metaphorical, coming from the Bible, where the phrase “it is written” refers to something divinely ordained. That is, it couldn’t have not been written. We aren’t meant to interpret the concept scriptum est as a divine one, however; Suominen simply wishes to emphasize that everything that has been written has been written. The concept seems to constellate several things: the past in which the writing was written, the act of writing, the state of this action being completed and the writing’s existence in the presence. As Suominen says:

The very notion of scriptum est particularly serves my concept of the library as a place where there are books that always represent the past.

Regardless of whether the concept of scriptum est is found to be useful in other ways, this aspect of the concept is quite interesting. It’s not that something was written; rather, it is written. Writing is, befuddlingly, an anachronism!