Documenting multiple temporalities
ISSN: 0022-0418
Article publication date: 5 October 2021
Issue publication date: 3 January 2022
Abstract
Purpose
This article explores the varied ways that individuals create and use calendars, planners and other cognitive artifacts to document the multiple temporalities that make up their everyday lives. It reveals the hidden documentary time work required to synchronize, coordinate or entrain their activities to those of others.
Design/methodology/approach
We interviewed 47 Canadian participants in their homes, workplaces or other locations and photographed their documents. We analyzed qualitatively; first thematically to identify mentions of times, and then relationally to reveal how documentary time work was situated within participants' broader contexts.
Findings
Participants' documents revealed a wide variety of temporalities, some embedded in the templates they used, and others added by document creators and users. Participants' documentary time work involved creating and using a variety of tools and strategies to reconcile and manage multiple temporalities and indexical time concepts that held multiple meanings. Their work employed both standard “off the shelf” and individualized “do-it-yourself” approaches.
Originality/value
This article combines several concepts of invisible work (document work, time work, articulation work) to show both how individuals engage in documentary time work and how that work is situated within broader social and temporal contexts and standards.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
This study was funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Insight Grant, 435-2012-0108. The authors would like to acknowledge the support of several LIS doctoral students in collecting the data: Rachel Melis, Sherilyn Williams, Lola Wong, Lucia Cedeira Serantes, and Cameron Hoffman-McGaw. The authors are very grateful for the participants’ generosity with their time and perspectives, and for the thoughtful engagement of the anonymous peer reviewers.
Citation
McKenzie, P.J. and Davies, E. (2022), "Documenting multiple temporalities", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 78 No. 1, pp. 38-59. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-11-2020-0196
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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