Homo Documentator: Architecture and the Political Economy of Information

Abstract

In her prescient essay What is Documentation? (Qu’est-ce que la documentation?), published in French in 1951, the renowned librarian and UNESCO affiliate Suzanne Briet outlined how a new science of documentation—a forerunner of today’s information science—had in recent decades expanded “productivity” in all cultural, scientific, and industrial fields. As an entirely new kind of “cultural technique,” documentation’s reach had become so pervasive, she wrote, that it had given rise to homo documentator—an individual “born from the new conditions of research and technology”: