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From Documents to Information: A Historical Perspective [ read paper ] Keywords: Document, information, text, history For anyone with a theoretical inclination, the words "document" and "information" are problematic. In a world increasingly moving beyond paper, the word "document" can seem outmoded, and attempts to expand it can seem overly ambitious. The word "information," by contrast, has the advantage of suggesting what is new and exciting; yet attempts to characterize and define it are numerous, and there is still little agreement about just what it might mean. But if these notions are problematic, so too is the relationship between them. Popular understanding holds that documents "contain" information. This view, however, has been criticized for enforcing a strict (and inaccurate) separation between form and content, between container and contained. In this paper I want to approach the relationship between documents and information from a historical perspective. In the first part, I will explore an idea first proposed by Ivan Illich. In his book In the Vineyard of the Text (Illich 1993), Illich argues that the roots of our modern conception of information can be found in the twelfth century transition from a monastic mode of reading (lectio divina or sacred reading) to a more modern form of apprehension. For the monastic reader, Illich suggests, reading was a deeply embodied act in two senses: First, by reading aloud (the normal mode of reading, even when alone), the reader literally embodied and enacted the words. Second, the manuscript from which the reader read was a unity, an embodied whole, in the sense that the marks on the page, the words, and their meaning were not conceived of as separate from one another. Indeed it was only with the development of new "techniques and habits" of reading that it became possible "to imagine the ’text’ as something detached from the physical reality of a page." (page 4). Such a process of abstraction and separation, Illich proposes, eventually gave us today’s conception of information as bits of content that can be poured into containers. This is an intriguing perspective and in the second part of the paper I will further explore and critique it. How can we understand, for example, the suggestion that at a prior time in history the modern notion of "text" did not exist? Are there independent sources that might corroborate this claim? In the third and final portion of the paper, I will consider how this perspective might shed some light on our current attempts to make sense of documents and information. Is it possible, for example, that Illich’s conjectured pre-modern understanding of documents can help us recover a sense of the unity, uniqueness, and embodiment of documents? Illich, I. (1993). In the Vineyard of the Text: A Commentary to Hugh's Didascalicon. Chicago, University of Chicago Press. David M. Levy
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last updated 8.may 2003