The Status of the Document in the Digital Age: A Multidisciplinary Approach, Part 2

Abstract

The power and ubiquity of digital technologies has increased surveillance and control through the stockpiling of documentary evidence about individuals. Simultaneously, the easy availability of digital image editing tools has undermined the truth claims of traditionally authoritative documentary forms. Primary documents, always so central to academic research, are now more available but less contextualized as researchers access them digitally. We are a multidisciplinary faculty working group at QCC, CUNY exploring these issues with our students in classes in history, film, art, music and literature. We are creating a weblog dedicated to re-understanding documentary evidence in the digital age. Our aims are ultimately pedagogical. We want to enable our students to develop and refine their "documentary literacy" in order to think critically and across disciplines about how documents, and documentary "evidence" of all sorts are used.