Indexing It All: The Subject in the Age of Documentation, Information, and Data

Philip Hider (School of Information Studies, Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga, Australia)

The Electronic Library

ISSN: 0264-0473

Article publication date: 5 October 2015

1604

Citation

Philip Hider (2015), "Indexing It All: The Subject in the Age of Documentation, Information, and Data", The Electronic Library, Vol. 33 No. 5, pp. 960-962. https://doi.org/10.1108/EL-01-2015-0019

Publisher

:

Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2015, Emerald Group Publishing Limited


This book is not really about indexing per se. Rather it is a philosophical treatise on where our increasingly automated and ubiquitous information systems are taking us. Day makes many interesting claims in this impressive critique of the way in which information technology is used in today’s knowledge economy. Specifically, he argues that the neoliberal, consumerist agenda is supported by the Web technologies which are now beginning to shape market forces, with individuals reduced to particular, fractured online identifies that are indexed and quantified for politico-economic purposes, as part of “social big data”. Moreover, these identifies are fashioned by the systems they are constructed in, as are individuals’ information, and other, needs. Search engine personalisation and social media applications are turning “users” into “consumers”. Whereas in the modernist era, labour was exploited by capital, in the so-called information age, the whole person is exploited, as both subject and object.

For Day, then, “data science” is assisting the neoliberal cause, turning people into data, leading to the fragmentation of the self. Further, according to Day, the origins of this phenomenon can be traced back through the history of library and information science (LIS). Computer-based information retrieval started fragmenting text in the middle of the twentieth century. Nowadays, “close” critical reading of texts, even in the humanities, is giving way to “skimming” (a practice that other commentators have expressed concern about). However, Day argues that the autonomy and integrity of texts was first undermined prior to the emergence of “information science”. He contrasts the (Charles) “Cutter” tradition of cataloguing books for “readers” with the (Paul) “Otlet” tradition of “documentation”, in which texts are used as evidence and indexed as such. This instrumentalist, and quantitative, approach was underpinned by honourable intentions: Otlet believed that better, and universal, documentation would help bring about world peace. Day argues that it instead moved texts into the modern political economy, as units of scientific and academic labour. He thus posits a regressive evolution of indexing, from Cutter, through Otlet and pre-coordinated systems, then through the post-coordinated systems of the latter half of the twentieth century, to Google and the indexing of “everything” (that’s online). It appears that LIS has a lot to answer for.

Day’s text deserves the close reading that may currently be in short supply. Indeed, it requires close reading, as it is somewhat challenging, especially for those less steeped in political philosophy. It is not especially verbose (unlike another book in the same series), but it is highly abstract, and would have benefitted from the use of more examples. Day does not really suggest a way out of the present neoliberal malaise, but few books on this theme have been able to do so. What Day does do, however, is position LIS firmly in the political economies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As he observes, LIS has seldom critically considered its underlying assumptions. Librarians and other information professionals have been aiming to satisfy users’ needs for over a hundred years. Why? Are they in fact guilty of perpetuating, or even furthering, an exploitative political economy? Are they guilty of discouraging critical reading, and reading for its own sake (as described by Day in terms of the writings of Martin Heidegger)? Could even the new cataloguing code, Resource Description and Access, with its “linked data” ambitions, be a party to neoliberalism?

The answer to the above questions is surely no, at least not intentionally. Yet, it does raise a fundamental question: To what extent should librarians act critically? Just like everyone else, they cannot act “neutrally” and need to consider the consequences of their work. This does not necessarily mean that they should stop indexing, however, as I expect Day would agree. Librarians might afford themselves the belief or at least the hope, that ultimately the work they choose to carry out will impact positively on the society. The indexing that libraries are responsible for has very little to do with the indexing that pervades today’s World Wide Web. It is true that their controlled vocabularies and other bibliographic standards influence users’ needs, but this can be seen as assistive rather than as imposing. As intermediaries, indexers have always had some influence. The “Cutter” tradition has produced similar vocabularies to those of the “Otlet” tradition (though Cutter’s legacy emphasised “literary warrant”, the traditions were never very discrete). Both pre-coordinated and post-coordinated systems were constructed to help readers, and later users, when library resources included non-textual materials, find items of interest, rather than cite documents. Even computer-based retrieval was for many years primarily about maximising recall and precision, to tackle the growing number of resources being published, particularly in science and technology. For sure, this may be seen as part of the industrialisation of scientific research, but most would agree that this research has improved many millions of peoples’ lives. It should also be pointed out that information/document retrieval systems are not particularly unique to capitalist economies, and that the various stages in Day’s “evolution” are by no means mutually exclusive: both pre-coordinated and post-coordinated professional indexing are still combined with automated, content-based retrieval, often in the same system.

It is the way in which library discovery systems are now part of a much larger information environment that is, I think, the bigger issue. The Internet operates independently of libraries, and it is these operations that need close scrutiny, more than LIS or its history (or texts, for that matter). Of course, the field of LIS should play a role in conducting, as well as supporting, this scrutiny, and it is here that Day makes a notable contribution. My favourite passage from the book may strike a chord with others:

Today, it sometimes seems that reading books wastes too much time and so they are marked into fragments by indexes and they come to be made up of articles by different authors. Keywords are used to find parts of texts and the texts or these parts are gathered into “infographic” representations. Articles waste too much time, and so they are abstracted and summarized and their results charted. These waste too much time and so we read web “long journalism” and short fragments of web articles. These waste too much time, and so we inform and communicate through commentary fragments and “like” indicators on Facebook. These waste too much time and so we use Twitter. These waste too much time, and so we simply photograph our experiences and post them on Instagram or the like. The documentary universe enlarges, the attention economy becomes shorter and shorter, and the demands of reading less and less (p. 147).

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