A review by alexander0
Scrolling Forward, Second Edition: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age by David M. Levy, Ruth Ozeki
3.0
As a brief, well organized, poetic introduction to a (post?)structural notion of document, this is a great start! Even though this book is more than a decade old, it still holds up.
I had some qualms with the fact that the book centers very strongly around historic discourse and academic work related to the document and doesn't consider where the author's definitions might lead one to see a document being in more extreme cases. For example, the notion of document is very centered around being a product of a human, and necessarily a product that is a part of individual's consciousness, or is at least a part of an understood and intentionally designed process as a norm. I specifically see this as a limitation. In fact, the first chapter called "Meditation on a Receipt" could be replaced with a new first chapter or perhaps it could be followed by another called, "Meditation on a Meme" and discuss how norms could emerge through subconscious mimicry, and that would have reframed several later chapters.
Likewise, I had trouble with accepting the idea that only people create documents. If one is a scientist, specifically in a positivist or post-positivist tradition, one might argue that nature has its own documents. Or within a Spinozian or Deleuzian tradition that often action itself is experiencing the world in order to create communication or a language with nature, which thereby IS, by Levy's definition, nature speaking through its systematic existence. If that is true, then nature contains documents, that admittedly are still understood through human translation, but are not themselves grounded on any closed group of individuals' cognition. Rather it is grounded on the common affects created by that non-human body.
I had some qualms with the fact that the book centers very strongly around historic discourse and academic work related to the document and doesn't consider where the author's definitions might lead one to see a document being in more extreme cases. For example, the notion of document is very centered around being a product of a human, and necessarily a product that is a part of individual's consciousness, or is at least a part of an understood and intentionally designed process as a norm. I specifically see this as a limitation. In fact, the first chapter called "Meditation on a Receipt" could be replaced with a new first chapter or perhaps it could be followed by another called, "Meditation on a Meme" and discuss how norms could emerge through subconscious mimicry, and that would have reframed several later chapters.
Likewise, I had trouble with accepting the idea that only people create documents. If one is a scientist, specifically in a positivist or post-positivist tradition, one might argue that nature has its own documents. Or within a Spinozian or Deleuzian tradition that often action itself is experiencing the world in order to create communication or a language with nature, which thereby IS, by Levy's definition, nature speaking through its systematic existence. If that is true, then nature contains documents, that admittedly are still understood through human translation, but are not themselves grounded on any closed group of individuals' cognition. Rather it is grounded on the common affects created by that non-human body.