guidance for future action. Their persistence allows them to sustain or corroborate
individual or communal memories. They also often have aesthetic qualities and
symbolic connections with particular people, institutions, or places. Their richness
of affordances transcends any single aspect of their use (Yeo, 2007, pp. 330-331).
Conclusion
In recent years, 'information' has become something of a buzzword. Its importance
is constantly affirmed both by governments and by the popular media, which often
promote it as a key to transparency, democratic freedoms, and economic success.
Records professionals have been attracted by this message and have frequently
sought to adopt an information agenda. To many archivists and records managers,
emphasis on information seems to offer a professional image in tune with current
developments in the wider world, and the perceived association between
information and the emerging digital realm gives it a further aura of desirability and
prestige.
However, much recent writing about information has been driven by commercial or
technological approaches that take little account of the centrality of human agency
and social context. We cannot assume that records offer 'the unvarnished facts, the
raw data, the actual measurements, the real information' (Hamm, 2011, p. 44)
demanded by authors of current business textbooks, or the single 'source of truth'
(Kosur, 2015; Roon, 2016) sought by many data analysts and promoters of
blockchain technologies. Even when records appear to be purely factual, their
content depends on utterances that are circumstantially produced. Users who are
aware that 'there is a good deal of game playing in the record production
business' (Van Maanen Pentland, 1994, p. 58) will use this knowledge to assist
them in formulating and assessing information from the records they encounter.
Looking at records through the lens of speech act theory can help us gain a richer
understanding of 'the record production business'. While a speech-act view of
records does not deny that a record may undergo many adventures in its later life, or
that these adventures can be perceived as incessant processes of recontextualisation
(Caswell, 2016; McKemmish, 2001), its primary concern is with the moment of
inscription and the context in which a record first comes into being. At that
contextual moment, what takes place is a matter of action, not a matter of
information. Whatever may be our motive for keeping records or our comprehension
of using them, their creation is necessarily performative.
Speech act theory reminds us that records are not mere information objects or
containers of facts, but it also affirms that records do not simply dissolve into
interpretation. At the point of inscription, a record and an assertive, directive,
commissive, or declarative action are interlinked. In this sense, records have a
specific social identity; they are integral parts of the actions they represent.
archives in liquid times
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geoffrey yeo information, records, and the philosophy of speech acts
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