NEODOCUMENTATION & THE END OF INFORMATIO

A philosophical critique of information as relational, evidential, and transformative, grounded in neo-documentation, Heidegger, and Latour.

Ronald Day’s Neo-Documentation and the End of Information critiques the modern conception of information as representational “content.” The author proposes a radical reorientation—what he calls a “Copernican Revolution”—in how documents and information are understood. Drawing on neo-documentation theory, Heideggerian phenomenology, and Bruno Latour’s pragmatism, he argues for viewing documents not as containers of pre-existing facts but as dynamic, evidentiary entities—“powerful particulars”—emerging through contextual and relational affordances.

The book traces the legacy of early twentieth-century documentation efforts by Paul Otlet and Albert Kahn, who saw documentation as a way to universally capture and represent reality. Day contrasts this with the thought of Jean Brunhes and later documentation theorists like Suzanne Briet, Michael Buckland, and Bernd Frohmann, who foreground the contextual, performative, and emergent dimensions of documentation. Central to his argument is the concept of “documentality,” the process by which entities become informative through assemblages—social, technological, and institutional—that afford their expression. The book concludes with implications for archival theory, scientific documentation, and the evolving role of documentary theory in the age of AI.

Ronald E. Day is Professor of Information and Library Science at Indiana University at Bloomington. He is the author of The Modern Invention of Information; Indexing it All; Documentarity; and Ronald E. Day: Foundational Writings.