4
Towards Hyperdocumentary Regimes
Metadata, like the electrical grid and the highway system, fades into the background of everyday life, taken for granted as just part of what makes modern life run smoothly. (Pomerantz 2015, p. 3)
The question of regimes refers as much to disciplinary actions exercised by external forces as to norms progressively integrated by individuals. Associating documentary questions with the concept of regimes seems essential, since the document is part of the very constitution of regimes. While it is easy to immediately think of surveillance regimes that rely on recorded traces to make decisions about the future of individuals deemed heretical, illegitimate, or who may constitute a threat of some kind, the evolution of regimes is part of a complexity that places actions of power and of counter-power at different scales. It is within the framework of this complexity that hyperdocumentary regimes are gradually being constituted by mixing traditional regimes and their legal or police arsenal – a potential instrument of the worst police or dictatorial regimes – with interstitial regimes that pronounce rapid judgments and sometimes poorly substantiated denunciations, while new actors become the true conservators and administrators of evidence by attempting to process accumulated personal data through algorithmic-type processing.
New powers then appear in this framework both at the level of the stakes of accumulation, designation, qualification as well as at the level of the potentialities of treatment.
The current context renews old prerogatives and redistributes the cards, leading to a great deal of confusion in our ability to grasp what is happening now. But before attempting to better grasp the evolution of documentary regimes, we should first return to the documentary context of Paul Otlet’s time.
4.1. The documentary regime of Otlet’s time
Paul Otlet’s documentary thinking was written and developed in a period during which documents become increasingly present in various forms. We have seen in the first part the description that Otlet in particular produces of them at the beginning of the Traité de Documentation. New forms, new media, and above all new needs for administrations that have to deal with and manage the masses of documents produced by the new industrial era and the rise of the tertiary sectors.
Otlet was then concerned not only with bibliographic and library issues, but also with administrative and accounting issues. As the son of a wealthy industrialist, but also as a lawyer by training, he was aware of the importance of the documentary stakes as far as legislative aspects were concerned. The discovery of his pronounced interest in bibliographical and documentary issues developed during his time at Edmond Picard’s law firm (1836–1924) and continued thereafter, notably thanks to his meeting with the socialist and pacifist politician Henri La Fontaine.
Later, it was the need to manage his father’s business that challenged Paul Otlet. The stakes were as much documentary as they were bookkeeping-related. And it is not insignificant to recall Otlet’s pronounced interest in standardized accounting at all levels. Firstly, because his personal situation forced him to take up some of his father’s investments, which sometimes proved to be fruitless or even disastrous. The absence of rigorous document management and optimized accounting treatment ultimately conceals difficult financial situations. However, it was impossible for Otlet not to have some sort of plan, some kind of status report available at all times.
It seems important to me to consider Otlet both as a precursor of information sciences, but also as a precursor of organizational sciences. Indeed, documentation serves as a support to knowledge organization, but also to organizations in general. This is how Otlet sees it:
Documentation must be constituted as a systematic body of knowledge as science and doctrine on the one hand; as technology on the other; as a systematic body of organization on the third hand. (Otlet 1934, p. 11, author’s translation)
Otlet then specifies precisely this third point:
As an Organization: the rational organization of individual strengths and community work to achieve maximum correlational outcomes. Anything that by agreement and cooperation can bring about greater breadth and unity, thus facilitating Intellectual Work and the development of Thought (Economy or Organization, i.e. Biblio-economics). (Otlet 1934, p. 11, author’s translation)
The organization described here by Otlet is part of an industrial and Fordian logic. It is a question of maximizing potentialities, except that Otlet seeks to apply to the information model that of the industrial world. The aim is therefore to imagine mass processing with dedicated and trained personnel. In this work, Otlet carries out calculations to reduce the production time of bibliographic records and expects to benefit from high-performance typewriters for this purpose. Long before the famous 1974 declaration in which Paul Zurkowski (1974) used the term “information literacy” and called for the large-scale training of future employees competent in information processing, Paul Otlet envisaged this in his various works by emphasizing the need for new tools (Otlet 1926).
Otlet then imagines business management as a form of conducting, a metaphor he also uses in his encyclopedic projects such as his atlas projects (Figure 4.1).
Figure 4.1. Paul Otlet: “The atlas is the score in the process of being composed which will help to orchestrate the life of the city.”1 For a color version of this figure, see www.iste.co.uk/ledeuff/hyperdocumentation.zip
Hyperdocumentation as thought by Paul Otlet at a time when computers and digital processes did not exist can be explained by the fact that it was necessary to imagine methods to deal with the new documentary masses. This period of documentary expansion is highlighted by Lisa Gitelman (2014). In her work, Gitelman draws on the work American Document, which is in fact a choreography created in 1938 and whose objective is to denounce the rise of fascism in Europe while drawing on key moments in American history:
‘This is a documentary dance. Our documents are our legends – our poignantly near history – our folk tales.’ American Document stems from our national background. Essentially documentary, “American Document” progresses from the Indian Episode, to the Puritan, through the Emancipation period to the present. Words are spoken on the stage by an interlocutor to bring into focus the action of the dance. The lines spoken by the interlocutor are from the Declaration of Independence, a letter from Red Jacket of the Senecas, Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, Jonathan Edwards sermons, the Song of Songs, Walt Whitman's poems and other important American letters. American Document is an adventure in theater made necessary by the broad scope of the choreographer’s idea. (Gitelman 2014)
The example is interesting because it shows that documentary expansion is found in all its forms, including artistic ones. Cinema can be documentary just like most of the artistic expressions of the time. The choreographer's objective was therefore to produce both a document and a work. In this sense, American Document is part of a mnemonic and transmissive approach by wanting to celebrate the construction of democracy and the rights that are linked to it. The document in its artistic form here refers to a dance performance, and the goal is indeed to show and to make visible. The document thus proves to be a demonstration on two levels, both in the artistic sense, but also in the scientific sense, since it is a question of providing proof of a reasoning.
Lisa Gitelman considers the 1930s, the period during which the Traité de documentation was finalized, to be a period of documentary expansion. This expansion proved to be just as much a “documentary expression” that gradually took off in a variety of forms. Among the most frequent were those imagined by the bureaucracy, which then multiplied the forms. It then became a question of filing, classifying, organizing, finding, approving and proving. Paper or at least analogous documents proved to be the most efficient information carriers for handling and processing. There was a need for this in administrations, companies and also associations. Sylvie Fayet-Scribe, for her part, sees the development of a documentary and information culture during this period (Fayet-Scribe 2000). At the documentary level, this meant that the majority of documents produced did not come from the literary sphere, but rather from an administrative sphere supplemented by a sphere of scientific and professional productions that could be described as scientific and technical information.
It is important to keep these aspects in mind, which avoids making value judgments too quickly, especially nowadays when the frequent accusation of a degradation of the quality of the information available on the Web tends to enchant the early ages of the Web in the same way that analogical documentary time could be considered as essentially the era of libraries.
However, this is not at all the case as documentary periods are part of pragmatic informational logic:
Viewing all genres of writing (...) throws out of focus the great mass of writing that is neither scientific nor literary but exists primarily to transmit information. (Guillory 2004, p. 111)
According to Guillory, the modern era is characterized by “the domination of document” (Guillory 2004, p. 113), which marks a decline in the art of oratory and rhetoric in favor of new, more managerial forms of writing that eliminate aesthetic embellishments and other sought-after formulas.
Flusser considers document production to be the preserve of post-industrial societies:
To live in post-industrial society, you need ‘documents’. Papers covered with symbols that allow devices to classify us. Every civil servant (ex-‘citizen’) has the right to have documents, and the devices have the duty to provide them. But ‘duty’ and ‘right’ are political categories, and therefore anachronistic in the post-industrial era. They no longer work. Thus, in order to obtain the documents indispensable to functional life, one must engage in a gymnastics strictly conforming to the rules of the game of the machines. In the machines there are departments programmed to provide documents. They have to be fed with other papers covered with symbols, the ‘requests’. The humiliation of this gesture of allegiance is already part of the program. Such requests must be full of standard symbols that are not part of the request messages, but are covered by formal rules. The paper must be of a desired format, the letters of the alphabet and Arabic numerals must be of a desired type, and pre-programmed questions printed on the paper must be answered in a desired language, the ‘language of devices’. These papers, called ‘forms’, are themselves supplied by other departments of the apparatus, and must be requested. Thus, the circularity of the operation has the form of an infinite regression. (Flusser 2019, p. 140, author’s translation)
One could even go further and consider that the library sector itself is not spared by these basic informational logics. This passage in Robert Musil’s Man Without Quality shows precisely the library logic at work in a Viennese library in this exchange between a librarian and a knowledge-hungry general:
Up the ladder he scoots, like a monkey, aiming straight at a book from below, fetches it down, and says: ‘Here it is, General, a bibliography of bibliographies for you’ – you know about that? In short, the alphabetical list of alphabetical lists of the titles of all the books and papers of the last five years dealing with ethical problems, exclusive of moral theology and literature, or however he put it, and he tries to slip away. I barely had time to grab his lapel and hang on to him.
‘Just a moment, sir,’ I cried, ‘you can’t leave me here without telling me, your secret, how you manage to...’ I’m afraid I let slip the word ‘madhouse,’ because that’s how I suddenly felt about it. ‘How do you find your way in this madhouse of books?’ He must have got the wrong impression – it occurred to me later that crazy people are given to calling others crazy – anyway, he just kept staring at my saber, and I could hardly keep hold of him. And then he gave me a real shock. When I didn’t let go of him he suddenly pulled himself up, rearing up in those wobbly pants of his, and said in a slow, very emphatic way, as though the time had come to give away the ultimate secret: ‘General,’ he said, ‘if you want to know how I know about every book here, I can tell you: Because I never read any of them.’
It was almost too much, I tell you! But when he saw how stunned I was, he explained himself. The secret of a good librarian is that he never reads anything more of the literature in his charge than the titles and the tables of contents. ‘Anyone who lets himself go and starts reading a book is lost as a librarian,’ he explained. ‘He’s bound to lose perspective.’
‘So,’ I said, trying to catch my breath, ‘you never read a single book?’
‘Never. Only the catalogs.’ (Musil 2011, p. 581)
The celebration of the catalog as a key to knowledge is described here by Musil in a humorous way. However, the catalog becomes the key element, because it lists the others; it symbolizes the rise in the importance of metadata that Buckland (2017) showed. It is here a symbol of the power to locate knowledge. It is not a question of having read everything, it is a question of knowing where the relevant document is. The hyperdocument is thus the one that possesses additional documentary qualities, and if Pascal Robert evoked the binder, then certainly the catalog, whatever its form, is also an excellent example, because it is a tool that contains metadata or indexes metadata and thus becomes an instrument for controlling the organization.
If the catalog becomes the best way to have an overview for a library, it is necessary to consider different catalogs for other organizations, in order to have an updated overview of the operations taking place:
Statistics must be constantly updated as a kind of permanent inventory of the operations carried out and their results, as well as the conditions under which they are carried out. This allows an effective and almost immediate control of the company, a quick study of all its modifications or permutations. (Otlet 1926, p. 13, author’s translation)
The consultation of the instrument of knowledge that is the emitted statistics allows us to have an overview that seems to allow the one who consults them to understand the situation better than the one who would be on the spot. The remote setting becomes a means of grasping the whole.
The dominance of the document pointed out by Guillory is accompanied by the development of structures that allow the collection of information and data, and which also produce the creation of infrastructures. It is therefore necessary to examine both the knowledge and the powers that these new regimes entail.
4.2. Changes in documentary regimes
Evoking document regimes helps to show that, in addition to the legal, transmissive and technical issues of documents, there are organizational and political issues that are based on power mechanisms. These regimes reveal continuities, but also marked evolutions, particularly between print and digital:
The ‘documentary reason’ was still part of a logic of going beyond the book support and the diversification of supports contained in the general idea of ‘document’. The digital era we have entered does not only modify the supports by unifying them, does not only change our work tools by computerizing them, it imposes new forms of knowledge, new ways of thinking and of dividing intellectual work. The book and the document are now digital, but, above all, they are broken down into new units: data and information, metadata and databases. The challenges of the development of the digital humanities are therefore not limited to preparing or accompanying researchers in the use of computer instruments and digital documents, nor to enhancing particular analyses, they also lie in the ability of the humanities to understand the major transformations that are irreversibly leading us into a new documentary regime. (Müller 2012, author’s translation)
If tensions and changes are notably taken into account in the evolution of research professions, especially in the human and social sciences and more particularly in the digital humanities (Le Deuff 2018), it is also a question of understanding what these regimes really correspond to.
4.2.1. Between memory and knowledge carriers
This importance of documentary forms has grown over the centuries with an increasingly massive production, particularly in terms of paper, and increasingly diverse and varied forms, thanks to the development of computer tools and information systems. This mass of documentary material that bears witness to the activities of individuals and organizations constitutes the material of the documentality described by the Italian philosopher Maurizio Ferraris, who considers that without this outsourced production, it would be difficult to constitute a memory of humanity and therefore a culture. The document becomes the very essence of man’s existence, or at least the proof that it exists:
A human being who has no language, no habits, no memory, that is a being deprived of inscriptions and documents, could hardly cultivate social intentions, feelings or aspirations. We grow through imitation, and as we grow, this mimesis generates what seems to be spontaneous behavior: awareness and meaning. It is in this sense that there is a primacy of the letter over the spirit, or, more precisely, that the spirit is a modification of the letter, a derivation: if there were no letter, there would not be this by-product of the letter that is the spirit, just as, if there were no memory, there would not be this collateral effect of memory that is thought. (Ferraris 2014, introduction, para. 7, author’s translation)
The importance of the support that Ferraris puts forward is well known in the theories of information and communication since the work of Otlet and Briet, but also of Robert Estivals:
The document is an object carrying information. This implies that it is a fixed medium. All fugitive media are therefore discarded. At this point any material element is, or can become, a document. (Estivals 1987, p. 51, author’s translation)
This materiality or inscription is also what allows its capacity to escape from the present moment, from the ephemeral to constitute an anti-event, to use Robert Escarpit’s formula (Escarpit 1976, p. 59).
But it is also by escaping the immediate through the document that documentary regimes are precisely instruments of mediation.
4.2.2. Hypermediation
The document has undeniable communication and networking qualities. The document is thus considered as a medium in the work of the RTP Doc (Pédauque 2006). If one wants to link the aspects that concern the carriers with their media potentiality, it is advisable to return to the mediological approach put forward by Régis Debray (1991). The division into media spheres (logosphere, graphosphere, videosphere) remains stimulating, provided that we now follow the positioning of Louise Merzeau who has renewed the mediological conceptions, notably by taking into account the mutations linked to Web environments with the hypersphere (Merzeau 2007). This hypersphere allows mediology to evolve beyond binary oppositions and to show the complex intricacies of the work and the importance of the documentary and indexing stakes involved:
Another paradox constituting the hypersphere consists in the hybridization of stock and flow. Indexed over time, the value of information becomes outdated: one new hunt chases the other and all content undergoes the same injunction to update. At the same time, digital technology favors an unprecedented development of external memories. Behind the volatility of communications, computerization leads to an exponential multiplication of traces and internal layers of information. In fact, it is because they are unstable and delocalized that electronic data must be coupled with metadata, that is, information about information. Reporting, structuring, indexing or classification: everything that used to be the subject of after-the-fact documentation work now goes back to the production stage. Keywords are provided with the text, the shooting data with the image, the making of with the film, the disc references with the piece of music, etc. Thus self-referencing, each document can not only circulate more easily on the networks, but also serve itself as an index to point to other documents. (Merzeau 2007, author’s translation)
A hypersphere that Louise Merzeau connects with the memory issues correlated to this production of documents and metadata. The hypersphere being a regime based on traces (Merzeau 2011) that places the document in a different relationship from that of the monument:
The document implements a very different memory and semiotic process. If it does proceed from a code as an inscription, its relationship to the referent is more analogical than symbolic. The note, the sketch, the plan, the aerial photograph or the radiograph have more of a descriptive than a significant relationship with their object. To varying degrees, they all tend towards the model of metonymy, giving themselves as a part of the whole that they designate. Whether it is a fragment actually taken from the object (by photonic or magnetic imprint) or an arbitrary selection of a few relevant features, the document short-circuits the distance to the referent. For a given need, it takes the place of the object, because it is a double of it, both reduced (by the scale, the material or the formalism of the language) and increased (by the added value of an information). This double logic of contraction and generativity makes it a space and time saver. It must make the more fit into the less, and therefore ignores a priori any claim to the monumental. (Merzeau 1999, p. 50, author’s translation)
Louise Merzeau’s hypersphere is therefore based on documentary masses, which brings her closer to the hyperdocumentation envisaged by Paul Otlet, which does not totally exclude a claim to monumentality because of a massive effect, but also because of a claim to memory.
The documentary masses are to be taken into account both in the daily life of individuals (in which it manifests itself through documenting actions via the smartphone for example), and in organizations where its actions are constantly growing since the increase of bureaucracy and tertiarization. This documentation, which seemed more obvious when it came to accumulating paper or paperwork, does not disappear with digitization processes. Documentation professionals are well aware of this, as they were among the first to question and develop electronic document management (EDM) solutions, which later became known as EDRMS (electronic document and records management system). The mass of documents remains present, accumulating on servers, hard disks and backup media. There is no guarantee that the documents will be preserved in the long term. World War I veteran and Stanford historian Robert C. Binkley said that “the records of our time are written in the dust” and bemoaned the poor quality of preservation of paper documents, as paper had become cheap and therefore commonly used during the 19th century.
If the dust seems to have changed in appearance to silicon, it is not guaranteed that long-term preservation is assured, quite the contrary. This requires a review of current preservation methods and standards, and backup practices in the cloud. It is opportune to resituate these current practices with previous attempts to reproduce documents (the various reprography techniques in particular).
Preservation is a means of establishing power, not only by testifying to this capacity, which confers a form of sustainability on the institution capable of mastering places of memory, but above all because preservation implies the possibility of providing documentary evidence.
4.2.3. Probability regimes
Current practices have not diminished this input of evidence, of traceability, so that records of documentality tend to increase rather than decrease. If Foucault evoked a control over bodies via an increasing biopower, we have entered into logics of norms and forms that impose, conform and control, a priori in order to better guarantee our security. These regimes imply a relationship to truth that is renewed but little changed in their profound nature. They remain instruments of control that seek to reduce risks. The regimes of documentality can be considered as regimes of truth in the sense understood by Michel Foucault. In Gouvernement des vivants (Foucault 2012), he describes these regimes as follows:
It is quite simply the idea that there can be no government without those who govern indexing their actions, their choices, their decisions to a set of true knowledge, rationally founded principles or exact knowledge, which is not simply a matter of the general wisdom of the prince or of reason in general, but of a rational structure which is specific to a domain of possible objects and which is the State. In other words, the idea of a reason of State seems to me to have been in modern Europe the first usable way, in the relationship between the exercise of power and the manifestation of truth. (Foucault 2012, p. 14, author’s translation)
What is important to understand is that the individual and his knowledge are necessarily accompanied by a comparative logic and positioning in relation to norms, or in any case the representation of an “average man” to use Adolphe Quetelet’s expression. The a-normal represents that which deviates too far from the norm thus understood, or even studied in its average, or even its mediocrity, to better distinguish what is exceptional and sometimes monstrous.
But monstrosity is not only based on the logic of being put aside in specialized institutions, it also allows the logic of monstration. This monstration can also be seen when it is a question of highlighting more personal elements that are hidden or buried. Truth regimes are thus very often based on the logic of confessions described by Michel Foucault (2012) and which take on new forms within current systems.
4.2.4. Regimes of confession and conversion
According to Foucault, the act of conversion, metanoia, is carried out both by a symbolic religious conversion (for example, with baptism for Catholics), as well as by a conversion in itself. This process is based on the act of confession. A confession which consists of an admission which is exercised before God (or, obviously, before God’s delegates). Here, this intimate act of confession is thus externalized, but above all it is oralized. The most fervent followers then become penitents, that is, they produce what Foucault calls an exomologesis. This confession must be considered as the production of a documentality, of which the body becomes the support as proof of the confession. In fact, it is a matter of providing proof of a painful work on oneself, laboriosor probatio. This act of confession is found in the editorial forms that are practiced in Freudian psychoanalysis. The exteriority of reflections and dreams is then documented. The intimate becomes ex-time, the concept has been used frequently in the case of blogs. The idea of a confession then becomes the exercise of a documentality that is constantly taking off with the mechanisms of the digital. What was hidden, a passion that is sometimes not very avowable becomes what needs to be put forward in order to be visible and to hope to capture attention. From then on, this emphasis on the self through a variety of documentary productions is in line with Ferraris’ analysis, which shows that in the end a declaration is produced that aims at sharing oneself, of which “this is my corpus” would be the new adage:
One may then wonder whether, instead of suppressing the resurrection by reproducing it in a hallucinated form through the mirage of a very long and boring life, as in the promises of a life up to 120 years and beyond, it would not be better to opt for a weaker hypothesis, which would not conflict with any form of common sense and which would concern not resurrection, but survival. It is not the carnal body that comes back to life, because it is incompatible with everything we know, nor the spiritual body, because no one has ever known what it is. It is the typographic body that survives, the corpus of signs and traces that we have left, which has the characteristic of prolonging the spirit. In short, what I would like to repropose here is the possibility that our archives and computer corpuses may be preserved, at least for some time, from the imminent destruction caused in large part by the rapidity of technological transformations. We do not know if and to what extent the work of preservation will be able to take place. What we do need to be aware of, however, is that, as I suggested in the first chapter, each of us, by pointing to our iPad or the external hard disk on which we are storing our archives, can already say: ‘This is my corpus.’ Again, it is not true that the spirit invigorates and the letter kills: on the contrary, the letter becomes the condition of possibility of the spirit, it guarantees its survival. (Ferraris 2014, chap. 6, para. 6, author’s translation)
Between a confession to oneself and a confession to a “great other” such as the network, the regimes of truth and confession come together to transform the documents thus obtained into “monumental” forms.
4.2.5. Regimes of monumentality
Linking the documentary question to the monumental perspective is nothing new. Foucault’s phrase is famous, but it illustrates well the transformation that the writing of history brings about:
History is that which transforms documents into monuments. In that area, where, in the past, history deciphered the traces left by men, it now deploys a mass of elements that have to be grouped, made relevant, placed in relation to one another to form totalities. (Foucault 1972, p. 7)
The work of compiling and assembling allows the constitution of larger entities that can be analyzed and controlled. If the operation can be understood in the work of a researcher or historian, it is also carried out with regard to the stakes of power with its strategies of division, of which Vauban’s figure embodies the logic, which makes it possible to obtain tables of the situation of the kingdom and to improve its organization and management through forms that are in fact those of an information system.
The document can constitute a form of study instrument by being transformed and thus instrumented for historical purposes, that is used for purposes other than those originally intended. The passage of the document becoming a monument concerns only particular or exceptional cases in the historical sense, such as the Rosetta Stone (whose materiality also facilitates this passage), but also texts of a constitutional type. The regimes of documentality are also those of monumentality, in the sense of the monumental compilation of accumulated documents, and this increasingly over shortened times, even close to real time. The transition to digital changes this logic of deferred magnitude. Big data is the symbol of those regimes of documentality that seek accumulation and go beyond the need to memorize and remember monumentum in the classical sense, which referred in particular to the funerary stele, to favor a perpetual memory.
It is also a return to the other meanings of the word “monument” which finally join Paul Otlet’s recommendations regarding the good administration of organizations and accounts (Otlet 1926). Monument comes from monere whose meanings actually concern the action of remembering and recalling, but also the act of warning, advising and predicting. This third meaning given by the Latin-French dictionary Gaffiot shows the range of meanings of the verb monere by evoking an intelligence inspired by the gods. But it is the derived words that are the most useful for understanding what is happening. Indeed, this documentary monumentality calls for a monitoring that is not a constant attention in the sense of a watch, but more of a surveillance. This aspect is already noted by Yates in her work on bureaucracy where she emphasizes the need to monitor and evaluate performance (Yates 1993, p. 13) through documents. This strong relationship between document and control is also well recalled by Guillory:
The connection between the document and control is attested at the deep level of philology. Our word control derives from contrarotulare, a procedure by which Roman officials compared facts at hand ‘against the rolls’, against the state administration's written records or scrolls (rotulae). (Guillory 2004, p. 12)
This control now consists of making various documents from different sources visible. Whereas the document with historical value could become a monument, all the documents thus instrumentalized by automatic analysis techniques allow us to transform them into a monumentality of data which can then be made visible. In the end, this visibility is accompanied by a desire not only to control the present, but also to make documents, which are instruments of the past, into elements of prediction. This logic perfectly illustrated by science fiction questions the role of a stochastic man, as Robert Silverberg wrote in an astonishing way in 1975:
What I did was sophisticated and highly technical, but it was a species of witchcraft, too. I wallowed in harmonic means, positive skews, modal values, and parameters of dispersion. My office was a maze of display screens and graphs. I kept a battery of jumbo computers running around the clock, and what looked like a wristwatch on my wrong arm was actually a data terminal that rarely had time to cool. But the heavy math and the highpowered Hollywood technology were simply aspects of the preliminary phases of my work, the intake stage. When actual projections had to be made, IBM couldn't help me. I had to do my trick with nothing but my unaided mind. I would stand in a dreadful solitude on the edge of that cliff, and though sonar may have told me the configuration of the ocean bottom, though GE’s finest transponders had registered the velocity of current flow and the water’s temperature and turbidity index, I was altogether on my own in the crucial moment of realization. I would scan the water with narrowed eyes, flexing my knees, swinging my arms, filling my lungs with air, waiting until I saw, until I truly saw, and when I felt that beautiful confident dizziness back of my eyebrows I would jump at last, I would launch myself headlong into the surging sea in search of that doubloon, I would shoot naked and unprotected and unerring toward my goal. (Silverberg 1975)
Without necessarily making predictions as is the case in this excerpt from Robert Silverberg’s novel, the Digital Humanities are fully the disciplines of study of documentary monumentality. They are also called upon to situate themselves in response to the temptation to reject science, which is sometimes accompanied by religious and messianic designs that are strongly present in transhumanist aims. These aspects are highlighted by David Pucheu (2009) by showing an American technological imaginary strongly impregnated with theology and which confers on certain protagonists of the platforms the impression of being the new elected people in charge of carrying out the formation of the New World with the help of information and communication technologies.
The aim here is not to go back over the history of computer science, but the question of the processing of masses of data suggests a gradual change of leadership in the field of information-documentation between Europe and the United States. Several key moments took place during the 20th century, particularly with regard to documentation and its hyperdocumentary potential through the use of machines for processing masses of data. The World Congress of Universal Documentation in Paris in 1937 at the Maison de la Chimie marked a decisive step. Described by Sylvie Fayet-Scribe (2000) as an “apotheosis” to mark a reflexive, theoretical, technical, associative and standardizing activity that had unfolded since the beginning of the decade, the congress also marked concrete achievements and opened up new perspectives.
It thus marked the creation of the International Federation for Information and Documentation (FID). It was both the confirmation that the “documentary spirit” developed by Paul Otlet would continue, but also the symbol of the end of a leadership that was also marked by the end of the RBU2 project. We can also see that at the technical level, developments were taking place on the North American side. The Documentation Institute was officially created in Washington as a non-profit organization in 1937, and Watson Davis became its president. A few months later, it was renamed the American Documentation3 Institute. Davis represented the documentary institution and the United States at the 1937 Congress (Buckland 1996). He was a fervent defender of microphotographic systems and he asked Herman Howe Fussler, a young librarian in charge of the Reprography Department of the Chicago Library, to set up a demonstration of the tools that the American services were beginning to have at their disposal on the occasion of the World’s Fair during which the World Documentation Congress was held. The engineering was carried out by a Navy lieutenant, Rupert H. Draeger, who had been working on these devices for several years and who would oversee developing specific equipment for the occasion. The material allowed for accelerated reproduction and efficient miniaturization. To carry out the demonstration, state-of-the-art equipment was thus brought to Paris, while it was decided to proceed with the microphotography of French content, in this case periodicals such as Le journal des débats, Le Temps and newspaper archives from the period of the French Revolution in partnership with the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Rayward 1983). The Rockefeller Foundation supported the project. While Draeger was in charge of finalizing the project in Paris, Fussler and his wife Gladys, also a librarian, managed to demonstrate the process by copying 200,000 pages in front of several thousand spectators, including the President of the Republic, Albert Lebrun. The demonstration received several awards which went first to Draeger and then to Fussler for his cooperation.
Beyond the rewards, it was a coup de force that the Americans thus managed to achieve by realizing a device through the collaboration of various American institutions. We already find this spirit that will ensure the success of future American developments in military research and development projects. We also find here the mutualization of means between the science sector, the world of libraries, the military world, associations and private foundations. What Otlet was struggling to do in Belgium, seemed possible in the United States at least as far as engineering was concerned. In the end, what seems to have been played out in the universal exhibitions up to the documentation congress was indeed a demonstration of national power. It would be pretentious to ignore the fact that international and universalist projects were initially able to develop thanks to the “national” support of Belgium, a young nation that saw it as a way to find legitimacy and a political positioning that would be constantly challenged by Switzerland, which would eventually win the seat of the League of Nations.
4.3. Post-Otlet documentation regimes
Visionary expectations have been transferred to the new technology of telecommunications and computers which also incorporates, extends the potential, and harnesses the earlier microfilm technology in new ways and for new purposes. In 1937 there was a sense of possibility that, with the technological assistance of microfilm and organizational change, documentation might achieve a potential discerned by visionaries like Otlet, Davis, and Wells. (Rayward 1983, p. 267)
Paradoxically, the failure of Otlet and his collaborators came from the fact that they combined the progress of knowledge with the rise of peace. The Mundaneum project finally failed for lack of sufficient means in a context of world wars, while the United States thought about the treatment of information and documentation by confirming the fact that, on the contrary, the war effort and its necessary success could only go hand in hand with the ability to possess the best tools and systems for accessing information, documents and knowledge.
The history of the Haviland Field family is interesting in this sense. The father Herbert Haviland Field was a well-known zoologist with a passion for classifications who set up a consistent bibliographical work with the concilium bibliographicum, created in 1985 in Zurich. It was one of the greatest scientific and technical information initiatives of the time. The aim was to provide an exhaustive coverage of the scientific literature on zoology in all languages using the most advanced documentary techniques. The search was optimized through a classification system based on the Universal Decimal Classification developed at the International Institute of Bibliography by Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine in Brussels (Belgium) the same year. The family history then continued through different informational logics. In fact, two of the sons of the zoologist and bibliographer made careers in espionage. Noel thus became involved in the protection of Jewish and communist refugees during the Second World War, while at the same time being a spy in the service of the NKVD from 1935 onwards. However, he was arrested in Czechoslovakia during the bureaucratic purges and imprisoned for five years. He would maintain links with the British services as well as the CIA by being close to the director Alen Dulles. However, he remained attached to the communist ideology until the end of his life. He ended his life with his wife in Budapest after his liberation.
One gets the impression from reading his itinerary that the informational stakes shifted from the quest for knowledge and the search for scientific truth to an ideological logic that consisted in knowing what others were doing, and guessing what they were about to do. Obviously, this is not entirely new historically, as the distinction between the scientist and the spy is sometimes not so clear-cut, as Gregory Afinogenov’s work shows (Afinogenov 2020).
The ideology of accessibility was shifting to other modes of operation, which were those of intelligence services. “If you’re hiding something from us, we have the right to find out,” seems to have become the dominant credo.
Regime change takes place in its strategic and ideological foundations. Though Otlet based his project on the link between knowledge and peace, it was paradoxically the opposite context that obtained greater success. While the Belgian bibliographer fought for peace, Belgium was struck each time by war and its tragic consequences. If we take the example of the United States, their choice was based on the acceptance of war in a variety of forms. Consequently, in preparing for a potential war, the whole strategy was focused on the best ways to win it, because the war became economic, strategic and not only military in the sense of a battlefield. Scientific and technical information, but also information in the journalistic sense, became potential grounds for war, whereas Otlet hoped that they would be a vector of peace.
The choice to fund research was above all a global strategic choice rather than a real desire to defend universal access to knowledge. On the American side, it was thus a question of equipping themselves with the best tools and equipment so as not to lag behind the competition, especially the Soviets. In fact, ARPANET was realized in a climate that sought above all initially to avoid internal wars between the different services of the army with the creation of a centralized agency, ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency). ARPANET was not a military creation, although this version of the story is often repeated in the media. Nevertheless, the network remained the result of a funding logic that aimed to show American power and its effectiveness. If the network’s objective went beyond the American borders because of its initial conception, the first steps showed a willingness to bring together and reunite the different American universities through the network.
What was at stake was not universalism in the tradition of Otlet, who defended a globalization of knowledge, but a form of demonstration of American power whose network was not intended to be universal, but rather “intergalactic” according to the meaning given to it by Licklider, and which, somewhere in its science fiction sense, gives the impression of preparing for a conquest of information. If Licklider envisages problems of communication and universal language, it is not a question of Esperanto, but of the idea of developing common languages to link the different computer networks. In a way, it is about linking different galaxies of computers.
From then on, the stakes were clearly technological, and Otlet was not mistaken with his interest in intellectual machines and pre-computerized attempts at a mechanical brain, such as the one made by the engineer Georges Astrouni.
While Otlet was carrying out a technological watch and hoping for collaboration in the development of tools specific to intellectual work, the field eventually became the focus of a struggle of which the Americans’ demonstration in 1937 was only one stage. Indeed, during this period, Emanuel Goldberg had to go to Paris to show a machine close to the American one. He had been kidnapped the previous year by the Nazis and finally owed his liberation to some relatives. He then chose to go to Paris for some time to work in a branch before returning to Palestine. Strangely enough, during the same period, American engineers were finally working on the same type of device – while in Paris.
Recognition of Goldberg’s work has been low, and it owes its current renewed interest only to the work of Buckland (2006). The stakes have become industrial, economic and political. Goldberg was forgotten and his work recovered and misquoted. His “statistical machine”, which was in fact a memex before its time, was not cited by Vannevar Bush with regard to scientific perspectives, while his work on microphotography was “recovered” by Zeiss. Subsequently, John Edgar Hoover cited a mysterious Professor Zapp as a scientific source regarding the work of miniature cameras useful for intelligence and espionage systems.
Technology is seen to serve the needs of nations in warfare, particularly with respect to information and communication needs.
If the Mundaneum project ended up running out of resources (including human resources), this was not the case with administrations and bureaucracies that were growing, while intellectual workers were sometimes idle during the war and inter-war periods. Priorities were now elsewhere, as filing needs became oriented towards invoicing, issuing and verifying checks, and collecting taxes, in short, everything that enabled better knowledge of clients or citizens.
Retrievability is increasingly concerned with finding a customer record or the record that mentions individual elements rather than finding the information contained in a document that corresponds to the need for information.
The most effective documentation regimes are therefore those that manage to generate their own documentation and methodology. For this, the ideal of the form is undeniable, especially for categorizing or rather reducing individuals. Robert Musil retranscribes this phenomenon perfectly in The Man Without Qualities, where the almost autobiographical character of Ulrich undergoes this attempt of reduction in metadata, whereas he undeniably proves to be a man impossible to index; the police prefect even deplores the fact that he does not appear in the directory:
Ulrich seemed to have been mistaken, however, in assuming that he himself did not yet exist in the cosmos of the police, for the next time the sergeant raised his head he looked straight at Ulrich; the last lines he had written gleamed damply, unblotted with sand, and Ulrich’s case suddenly appeared to have been officially in this bureaucratic existence for some time.
Name? Age? Occupation? Address? Ulrich was being questioned.
He felt as though he had been sucked into a machine that was dismembering him into impersonal, general components before the question of his guilt or innocence came up at all. His name, the most intellectually meaningless yet most emotionally charged words in the language for him, meant nothing here. His works, which had secured his reputation in the scientific world, a world ordinarily of such solid standing, here did not exist; he was not asked about them even once. His face counted only as an aggregate of officially describable features–it seemed to him that he had never before pondered the fact that his eyes were gray eyes, one of the four officially recognized kinds of eyes, one pair among millions; his hair was blond, his build tall, his face oval, and his distinguishing marks none, although he had his own opinion on that point. His own feeling was that he was tall and broad-shouldered, with a chest curving like a filled sail on the mast, and joints fastening his muscles like small links of steel whenever he was angry or fighting or when Bonadea was clinging to him; but that he was slender, fine-boned, dark, and as soft as a jellyfish floating in the water whenever he was reading a book that moved him or felt touched by a breath of that great homeless love whose presence in the world he had never been able to understand. So he could, even at such a moment as this, himself appreciate this statistical demystification of his person and feel inspired by the quantitative and descriptive procedures applied to him by the police apparatus as if it were a love lyric invented by Satan. The most amazing thing about it was that the police could not only dismantle a man so that nothing was left of him, they could also put him together again, recognizably and unmistakably, out of the same worthless components. All this achievement takes is that something imponderable be added, which they call ‘suspicion’. (Musil 2011, p. 200)
Ulrich is an individual who favors moving shapes and who rejects elements that are too fixed, immutable laws, because he is scientific and seeks above all to question the obvious. Undoubtedly, hyperdocumentary regimes are those that manage to better grasp movement, evolutions and “fluid men” not in the spiritist sense, but in the sense of agitations that are captured by devices that manage to demonstrate that our personal, professional, private movements are finally inscribed in patterns.
Among these simplest schemes are those that attempt to formalize informational exchanges around communication. A new informational ideology will succeed Paul Otlet’s work and will rely more on the fact that it can find financing and support in industrial infrastructures on the one hand, and on the other that it is undoubtedly better to rely on war technologies to obtain sustainable financing than on the organizational apparatuses of peace.
The evolution of documentary regimes is taking place both through the possibility of recovering data from previous regimes, a bit like Google is trying to do with Google Books, while seeking above all to optimize the maximum capture of data that the current one can produce. Pierre Lévy had perfectly glimpsed this perspective in 1987:
The civilization of operational information transmutes into algorithms and converts the contents of previous cultures into usable data. In doing so, it subordinates them to its own ends. Banking is both a shutdown and a return to a new circuit. But soon the computer culture will work more with the data captured by its sensors and on its own products than with the historical stock. (Lévy 1987, p. 42, author’s translation)
This switchover is currently taking place with the main intention of accumulating personal data in order to be able to take advantage of it. But here again, the issue is probably not as new and simple as one might think.