Indexing it all: the subject in the age of documentation, information, and data

In this book, Ronald Day offers a critical history of modern tradition of documentation. Focusing on documentary index (understood as a mode of social positioning), and drawing on work of French documentalist Suzanne Briet, Day explores understanding and uses of indexicality. He examines transition as indexes went from being explicit professional structures that mediated users and documents to being implicit infrastructural devices used in everyday information and communication acts. Doing so, he also traces three epistemic eras in representation of individuals and groups, first in forms of documents, then information, then data. Day investigates five cases from modern tradition of documentation. He considers socio-technical instrumentalism of Paul Otlet, the father of European (contrasting it to hermeneutic perspective of Martin Heidegger); shift from documentation to information science and accompanying transformation of persons and texts into users and information; social media's use of algorithms, further subsuming persons and texts; attempts to build android robots -- to embody human agency within an information system that resembles a human being; and social big data as a technique of neoliberal governance that employs indexing and analytics for purposes of surveillance. Finally, Day considers status of critique and judgment at a time when people and their rights of judgment are increasingly mediated, displaced, and replaced by modern documentary techniques.