Yes, an excellent point. In a way there are multiple realities going on for digital documents. They exist as code (and many different layers of code if I understand the OSI model correctly) which many people would fail to interpret in a meaningful way when presented with it directly (I certainly would). Though I suppose the code itself expressed visually or in some other way could have some inherent interest. They also exist as they "are intended" by whomever created them opened by the software they were created for and, in addition, they might possibly exist opened through alternative software which could produce different (if perhaps, indecipherable) results.

In part, I appreciate the pragmatism of Briet's approach. It would certainly make a cataloger's life easier to view documents in this way and, on its surface, it makes a tremendous amount of "sense".

However, I can't help but feel this view is a little too limited. Certainly, it seems to me, the antelope itself would be a source of information. In one way it is an example of what an "antelope" is, but it is also an individual and, beyond that, an individual at a certain snapshot in time.

In a very broad view, we can think that nothing is truly permanent as all things are constantly changing. I think it depends so much on how we observe and questions of time scale.

Human beings are not even exactly what we were in the past. We grow (both physically and in other ways), we change (we age, we change our minds, we change our clothes, we get tattoos, we erase tattoos) and eventually we, as an individual, will cease to exist by any observable means (depending on your belief system) other than by the "things" we leave behind.

We also continue to exist, in a sense, in the minds of those who knew us, but their memories cannot be a whole picture of who we were and certainly no one may know truly how we are inside our own heads. Others will certainly bring their own biases or preferences to their memories of us which may or may not be a complete picture of who we were.

Yes! I have to say I love this characterization. I feel Art has so much to offer here in terms of expanding our thinking about what can be documents, objects, things. I have a particular interest in modern art up to our current era (however it will be named when looked at from the rear view) where anything from a found object to a blank canvas becomes a piece of art once it is placed in a gallery or museum.

The act of placing a thing within the space gives it added significance. Thereby engaging the curators themselves into the process of defining an object. Not to mention that the artist, for whatever reason, selected this particular thing as opposed to all of the other possible things they could have selected. That is a kind of curation, we might say, the artist has engaged in.

Despite the fact that the artist didn't necessarily create the object themselves, they may have simply picked it up out of the forest or on the street, they have made a statement that this thing means something (or some thing). It seems to me taking this expansive view is powerful and may only be tempered by the very practical concerns of how to preserve, display or catalog a thing.

It seems natural to me that the definition of a document would evolve along with the technological advancements that allowed people to produce new types of documents or, at least, new types of "things". This could be a radio program at the dawn of that era or a television show at its outset and on and on to our current era.

It strikes me that preservation (of things we would consider "documents") has typically been a reactive rather than a proactive process. Maybe there is no way around this -- perhaps since we can't predict what the next popular format (I'm using that term "format" very loosely to include everything from a social media post to a video to something that exists at least in part on a physical storage medium) we can't prepare ways to preserve new documents. However, there could be some collaboration in theory between the industries creating these new vessels for information and those that would engage in preserving them. Just a thought.

Wow! That's cool.