Is A Star A Document? Catalogued Students and Learning Analytics

Abstract The media theorist Suzanne Briet proposed that through the recording of information about entities in the world, these entities are not only documented, but they themselves are rendered into documents . She asks us to consider the case of an antelope which is captured, brought to Europe, put in a zoo, and examined by experts and members of the public. She argues that the zoo is effectively a laboratory in which the antelope is analysed, displayed, and therefore itself becomes a document due to these material analytical assemblages around it. In this paper, I propose that Briet’s notion of the document can be applied to data visualisation used in learning analytics, and its effect on students. With reference to a philosophical discussion of the status of data visualisation in terms of Kant’s theory of the sublime versus Deleuze’s notion of the diagram, I argue that a learning analytics dashboard designed for individual student use not only renders the student into a document but also imbricates the student in a co-constitutive form of relationality with that document, which explicitly encourages and rewards a very particular form of action in the world in relation to the learning management system. I conclude that this has real-world effects not only in this inculcation, but in the reification of a particular neoliberal ideology of student engagement as a performance of observable, traceable, self-optimisation in a highly individualised educational worldview.