9.1. Which hyperdocumentary forms are “open”?

Otlet conceived of documentation in a technical milieu that hybridizes the potentialities of human collectives with those of technical objects in order to facilitate decision-making within common logics:

By the progressive formation of a collective brain. Already the functions that would be ensured are sketched out: perception, through information; ideation, through collective studies; memory, through documentation; impression, through the development of art; decisions, through common deliberations. (Otlet 1935, p. 378, author’s translation)

It is therefore essential to recall and defend the interest of common information goods both at the level of Internet and Web infrastructures, but also with regard to information sharing standards. Being able to learn without being constrained by incessant technical, social, intellectual and cultural accessibility difficulties seems essential in the perspective of “free” hyperdocumentation, or at least inscribed in an “open source” spirit, that is, allowing access to software code so that it may be taken up and modified, but also having technical documentation that really allows this to be done.

If it is increasingly platforms that possess documents and data on existences, which paths exist to consider benefiting from the advances of hyperdocumentation in a more open, more contributive and less controlled model? What is the place and skills of information professionals in this context? What are the renewed documentary skills for knowledge producers who want to avoid being short-circuited?

The study of documentary forms presupposes training logics rather than deformation or “formatting”. The point here is to understand that the forms, and in particular the software used, can sometimes be a hindrance in terms of uses and habits, even though the need is felt for a greater liberation of the data, which encourages a possible separation between the content and its various formats.

Documentary forms are now essentially native on machines. So the challenge is to ensure better interoperability in terms of software and formats, and to give priority to approaches that enable content to be retrieved and transformed. The separation of content and form enables other documents to be generated dynamically from queries. Document fixation becomes above all a logic of conservation and archiving when one wishes to preserve both form and content. But in the logic of flow, it is necessary to get rid of fixity to privilege possible reuses. This condition is both a means of ensuring wider accessibility, for example by facilitating automatic readings of text aloud or their transformation into Braille, but also a means of envisaging transformations and harvesting of data, as well as facilitated de facto conservation.

Open documentation must therefore fit into these data recovery logics. This moment has already been built among the library professions where the logic of bibliographic records was based on their possible copying and retrieval by other documentation centers, before their transformation into computer formats facilitated the exchange and retrieval of bibliographic data, lists of authorities, etc. and the exchange of data between them. Now, the challenge is to continue this documentary logic of opening up to a maximum of data sets produced in particular by institutions and organizations in the form of open data. However, this implies mechanisms and logics that must be inscribed in organizational processes in order to facilitate this implementation of accessibility. Within this framework, such projects aim to better inform citizens by offering the means to actors such as journalists or specialized companies to study, analyze and propose explanatory tracks on these different datasets made accessible.

The opening up is progressive and takes place in a more advanced way in the fields where documentary practices and technical and digital cultures are present. New tools are appearing to identify and harvest this new documentation. However, these hyperdocumentary issues continue to raise questions about the mechanisms for centralizing the indexing systems of these collections, as the warehouses of local authorities as well as those at the national or even European level seem to be less efficient than the data harvesters created by actors such as the GAFAMs. If such instruments are ultimately subject to the effects of centralization, particularly by actors like Google, which have moreover the means to perform on these data a work of curation and interrogation, this may open a form of imbalance between actors who have the means to index and analyze masses of data and States, local authorities or simple citizens who would ultimately be forced to go through the mediation of Google to try to get an understanding of it or simply try to have access to it, when the basic data may belong to them!

In addition to the necessary challenge of training citizens and training new mediators of digital information and data, it seems that the political and economic issue deserves a digital response (Le Deuff 2019b) on a more ambitious scale.

If incentive policies towards open data and open access scientific resources must be pursued, they cannot be achieved without an investment by the stakeholders concerned. However, this success can only be achieved through a policy of targeted means, which very often consists of reviewing the economic models associated with scientific publication and the publication of administrative data.

Open access is anything but free; it requires infrastructure and development and training policies that require costs.

The fact that the Web index is now the prerogative of a private player raises questions about potential avenues for a more open index, which could then be a source of other modes of innovation in the presentation of results. If alternative tools do exist, they are on a smaller scale and reserved for those who have the skills and means to try to manipulate them.

The fact that some competitors to GAFAM and especially to domain search engines are forced to demonstrate their technological advantage by a third-party argument which consists in saying that query data and personal elements are not stored is only a stopgap which very often masks a strong infrastructural weakness in terms of indexing. One can only deplore the fact that we want to pass off a marketing pirouette as an ethical message.

Information infrastructures are much more deserving of attention with respect to common goods, both in terms of heavy infrastructure and software.

9.2. Documentation as resistance

Documentation can then be defined and considered as a form of “resistance”. While we have shown and demonstrated that documentation activities are powerful forces of control, especially of individuals, it is also possible to consider that documentation can also be a weapon of resistance against various oppressions, manipulations or other dominant positions.

In line with the logic of sousveillance or hypodocumentation, taking care to document certain events in order to give them a form and finally a greater scope participates in these resistances. But more than that, it is not only a question of documenting in order to highlight or denounce, but also of giving possibilities to act or to do otherwise in an approach that is ultimately that of the encyclopedic culture as understood by Gilbert Simondon:

The greatness of the Encyclopedia, its novelty, resides in the fact that its prints of schemas and models of machines, which are an homage to the trades and to the rational knowledge of technical operations, are fundamentally major. But these prints do not have the role of pure, disinterested documentation for a public eager to satisfy its curiosity; the information in them is complete enough to constitute a useable practical documentation, such that anyone who owns the book would be capable of building the described or of further advancing the state reached by technics in that domain through an invention, and to begin his research where that of others who preceded him leaves off. (Simondon, translated by Malaspina and Rogove, Univocal, 2017, p. 110)

This is in line with the policies in favor of open access to make a maximum amount of scientific work freely available. But this barrier of technical or financial access is not the only one, as many others are sometimes more difficult, notably those of understanding and intellectual accessibility. It is impossible to think that all scientific documents can be intellectually accessible to all humans because of language barriers and especially because of the different fields of specialization. However, it is the role of educational institutions to ensure a rise in skills in order to be able to perfect and continue one’s own education autonomously. It is also up to the same institutions to manage to show the importance of the different fields of specialization and the hierarchies of competence to resist the leveling of expertise by phenomena of popularity of opinions.

The challenge is then to distinguish between accessibility, between a logic that is more consumption-oriented (read only) and a more ambitious one (read and write), according to the logic described by Lawrence Lessig, who precisely enjoins us to privilege the latter, as a culture that it is possible to appropriate and somehow “remix”.

This culture is only possible if a more open approach is favored, but the latter implies not only dedicated licenses such as Creative Commons or open source software licenses, but above all the fact that these works can also be well documented. This means a major evolution in cultural, scientific and technical practices. The encouragement to publish, that is to make public, is interesting, but the aim is above all to make it open and therefore reusable.

This implies the use of dedicated tools from wikis and the famous Wikipedia to new collaborative tools and other tools that document scientific processes and data creation, via tools that mix different approaches with devices that allow the development of documentation, especially software documentation.

In their article, “De l’hypothèse de la documentation comme technique de résistance et du wiki comme objet de ces résistances”, the authors define four main forms:

• – the tutorial form, which is learning-focused, allows the newcomer to start like a lesson. It is similar to the act of teaching someone how to plant vegetables or how to cook;
• – the practical, goal-oriented guide form shows how to solve a specific problem, through a series of steps. It is similar to the act of growing vegetables or a recipe in a cookbook;
• – the explanation form, which focuses on understanding, explains, provides background information and context. It is comparable to an article on the social history of the tomato or culinary social history;
• – the form of a reference guide, which is informationoriented, describes the design that has been completed. It aims for accuracy, thus verifying and adding sources, and seeks to be complete. It is similar to a reference encyclopedia article. (Vigneron et al. 2019, author’s translation)

The challenge is therefore to be able to document one’s own practices and knowledge in order to share them with others, and thus get out of territories deemed less legitimate scientifically and culturally in order to teach them in turn. The success of videos and other tutorials is part of this evolution of knowledge that Pierre Lévy (1997) anticipated.

In this framework, documentation can then be a form of resistance, because it offers alternative ways of doing things that are made explicit and documented and that can be reproduced. This does not necessarily mean considering that it is then possible to live in autarky by seeking to produce everything that appears necessary oneself, but rather to offer the citizen the means to have a choice, and to explain to him how he can do things differently, especially if he wishes to do so.

These forms of hyperdocumentation, which are more and more anchored in everyday life, are in line with the positive aspects desired by Otlet, in particular by mobilizing the intellect, but also fundamentally by mobilizing all the senses that permit the body to be able to understand, but also to be able to act, do, redo and innovate. The Ravelry social network¹ dedicated to creative hobbies and more specifically to crocheting and knitting is a good example of a hyperdocumentary platform. The network offers the possibility to search for information, documents, patterns with advanced search potentialities by proposing a diversity of facets that allows us to refine the results. But it is also a form of registration of personal achievements that can be shared, for example following a project that follows a pattern available on the site, to report on its progress and the quality of the final result. By combining information research and an attentive logic based on a production-documentation coupling, the Ravelry social network constitutes a hyperdocumentary platform. We would like to find such logics in other fields, especially scientific, but also in the field of contributory policies.

The hyperdocumentary balance can only work, however, if citizens’ literacies are ensured by training bodies accessible to the greatest number with dedicated training and mediators, and spaces with contributory potentialities that escape the logic of the centralizing platform.

Of course, this balance is not easy to achieve, as the forces involved seek different objectives, sometimes difficult to understand, sometimes acting in the shadows. However, it becomes difficult to escape from hyperdocumentation, so much so that the slightest supposedly secret agreement tends to generate documentary forms that can take on digital qualities, so much so that it becomes difficult to avoid leaks and the virality effects that accompany them.

9.3. Hyperleaks?

“Secret documentation is an insult to documentation,” Suzanne Briet (1951) stated in a sentence that was ultimately as much a plea for open access as a criticism of the policies of producing reserved documentation, which ultimately cannot be accessed by citizens.

While the potential for surveillance is increasing, the logics of resistance and denunciation are exercised through forms of documentary liberation, often illegal, but which are based on principles that are intended to be above national legislation or corporate directives. These principles are often those of the exercise of free will, which is carried out in an ethical necessity that obliges one to denounce what contravenes and what is carried out without the knowledge of categories of people or populations. This has been the initial spirit since the Snowden revelations. Snowden explains his position:

I used to work for the government, but now I work for the public. It took me nearly three decades to recognize that there was a distinction, and when I did, it got me into a bit of trouble at the office. (Snowden 2019)

The phenomenon of whistle-blowers and leaks of data or documents is initially part of the same state of mind, which is to show the limits, weaknesses and lies of democratic states or multinationals that claim to defend freedoms. The Wikileaks logic is thus part of an ideally democratic world in which certain actions are deemed responsible for abuses of power. This critical view of governmental or private organizations as being responsible for illegitimate powers or questionable actions has led Julian Assange to equate organizations with computers or networks that would have to be hacked in order to identify the informational elements that remain hidden in the process.

Actors like Wikileaks can only work with whistleblowers, employees or officials who may have had access to confidential information and who take the risk of disclosing information. Only democracies may appear to be the best territories for this risk-taking, even if whistleblowers have seen even in democracies that their lives have been negatively impacted. Assange sees conspiracy as a mode of governance that must be studied as a form of interrelated graphs that can be manipulated to surprise the plotting organization and then bring it down. To achieve this, the leaks’ challenge is based on revealing compromising information online. But the revelation is not only that of the compromising event, but of the systemic one that should be fought.

To this end, Julian Assange’s (2006) text proves to be interesting in terms of an analysis of conspiracy as a particular organology whose informational and communicational circulation should be studied, in order to update the device before “hacking” it. Leaks are then this form of hack that is positioned within the device to divert it from its usual circulation, to place documents in “derivation”.

Wikileaks is then one of those derivative machines that we described earlier, and this because no organization can function autonomously according to Julian Assange:

When we look at an authoritarian conspiracy as a whole, we see a system of interacting organs, a beast with arteries and veins whose blood may be thickened and slowed until it falls, stupefied; unable to sufficiently comprehend and control the forces in its environment. (Assange 2006)

The goal is therefore not only to organize the ideal conditions for the leakage of information in order to achieve the revelation, it is to become a new piece in the machine and then a new machine that comes to destabilize what Assange describes as a conspiracy. Wikileaks have required means to obtain, preserve, archive and disseminate the documents “revealed”, but their actual manipulation and understanding has often been through journalistic mediation to explain the ins and outs. This will also be the case of Football Leaks, as it is a question of analyzing a mass of information that is not so easy to grasp, because the documents are often initially scanned PDFs and not necessarily in plain text mode. In order to better circulate in the leaks, Wikileaks had called on data journalism specialists with the pioneer OWNI.fr to create a hyperdocumentary form that benefits from all the possibilities of information manipulation.

But the unveiling by these leaks finally corresponds to the will to respond to the insult of secret documentation, which is based on the fact that information is especially valuable if it is only known to a few people, or even remains hidden. Now, however, the stakes have shifted to the ability to detect adequate information among the available sources and not only in the elements that are hidden. If the mechanisms of surveillance and sousveillance thus respond to each other indefinitely, hyperdocumentation is increasingly practiced in resources that are directly accessible, provided one has sufficient informational and digital literacies to exploit it.

9.4. Hyperdocumentary convergence: the OSINT

The discourse of open or accessible documentation can also be heard in the professional changes in the information, documentation, journalism and intelligence professions, which are converging towards what is currently known as OSINT (Open Source Intelligence).

Considering open access information as a timely source of intelligence, this type of information is of interest to several professional fields including intelligence services, information and intelligence professionals, journalists, cybersecurity specialists, as well as hackers, enlightened citizens and even some activists.

The same informational territory finally becomes an issue of informational struggles, potential manipulations and a place of information overabundance that continues to shift the informational problematic from scarcity to a sense of infobesity. However, in the end, the challenge remains the same, that of finding relevant information that corresponds to identified needs. The available sources of information become sources from which one must know how to draw and be able to cross-reference and interpret in order to finally draw new lessons or even new information. OSINT requires above all intellectual as well as technical skills and abilities. Whatever the purpose of the research, one of the main issues remains the essential question of information evaluation. Indeed, information must be evaluated through processes used by OSINT actors, which consist of verifying sources, viral effects, the reuse of images or videos that have been manipulated or transformed, verifying what some people say according to documents that prove the veracity of a location, etc. But it is also a question of verifying which of these piled up pieces of information are the most reliable sources of data.

OSINT is a form of hyperdocumentation both because of the possibilities of increasing the amount of documentation it allows via targeted or automated collections, and because of the extension and increase of the possibilities of information availability, to the point where it now constitutes a significant part of the information available and which is likely to be a source of queries.

Open-source was ‘frosting on the cake’ of intelligence material dominated by signals, imagery, and human-source collection. Today, open source has expanded well beyond ‘frosting’ and comprises a large part of the cake itself. (Gannon 2001, p. 67)

The issue is therefore shifting from a willingness to collect information to a strategy for evaluating the information. OSINT is becoming a breeding ground for journalists, especially data and web journalists, who draw on it for new sources and new means and skills to evaluate information. It is within this framework that the principles of journalism are gradually developing, increasingly enhanced by digital tools, and in particular by the possibility of adding to the traditional article the sources that have participated in the writing process and which are also evidence of the advanced elements. DocumentCloud is thus a service that allows journalists to store and put online documents that can be shared or even integrated into the article. The service is reserved for journalists and is part of this evolution in the perception of journalism, which must now move from a climate of trust (“it’s true, it’s written in the newspaper”, “seen on television”) to the ability to demonstrate and prove what is being put forward:

DocumentCloud is a promising technological solution that may help foster a more trustworthy new breed of hyper-documented journalism and thereby enhance public trust. (Mor and Reich 2018, p. 3)

Hyperdocumented journalism, however, will need to acquire somewhat finer documentary skills, as the examination of sources offers opportunities for consultation, but their evaluation is not always carried out. The challenge is to succeed in combining the conditions of documentality with those of documentarity by demonstrating the documentary qualities of the sources mentioned, that is their veracity and identification.

What becomes interesting in the hyperdocumentary universe is that the omnipresence of documents and their micro and macro data forms lead to common bases of competence between various professions that handle documents and information. The information agent, the journalist, the documentalist, the archivist, the researcher, the hacker share knowledge and know-how that are absolutely essential in an era where post-truth discourse threatens hyperdocumentation with post-documentary risks, where everything is so potentially valuable that it leads to a general devaluation of information and knowledge.

9.5. Utopia or dystopia?

Considering free hyperdocumentation is essential if we want to avoid the classic phenomena of centrality and control of production and individuals, whether by States or companies. This freedom obviously remains idealized, as it requires learning, and therefore the full development of a culture.

It therefore presupposes political choices, laws, but also constraints that can be rules when it comes to ensuring the preservation of information assets and infrastructures such as the Internet and the Web, but also finally more or less integrated standards that consist in ensuring that forms of enclosure are avoided with regard to the intellectual and cultural assets produced.

Freedom of spirit is at this price, the price of accepting the constraints that are those of training, in order to be able to contribute with others. Pierre Lévy imagined in 1987, this man of computer culture, which we would call today digital culture, but which is certainly a hyperdocumentary culture:

To the various jargons, professional and technical patois, will be added a multitude of creoles or pidgins intermediate between natural and formal languages. The computer literate person will be characterized by a metalinguistic aptitude to handle these semi-mechanical idioms, to jump from one software saber to another, to travel from one micro-world to another. (Lévy 1987, pp. 34–35)

Lévy described a series of languages and dialects to be mastered in order to be able to exchange and contribute. This diversity can also prove to be a barrier to the inclusion of a large number of users and citizens. However, universal language projects such as IDO, Esperanto, or in another register Pierre Lévy’s IEML (Information Economy MetaLanguage) oscillate between a linguistic utopia and a risk of pre-formatted language.

It is probably more interesting to consider that rather than a single language, it is a common hyperdocumentary culture that we need. It can only be based on forms of social invention to which Paul Otlet aspired:

Utopia can be compared to an invention. The inventor starts from a need and through the various possibilities existing in reality, seeks an arrangement of them. The invention before our eyes is now divided into two main categories: those for so-called technical machines; those for so-called social machines. The great utopians are great inventors or at least belong to their lineage. When we have laboratories devoted to social invention, as we have for technical invention, we will progress in giant steps. Attempts to plan are steps in this direction, the generalization of the functions of information and scientific and social documentation are others, efforts to create coordinated centers of ideation, feeling and collective action are third. (Otlet 1935, p. 202, author’s translation)