Orders of knowledge and the

future of genres

Charles Bazerman

Bazerman@education.ucsb.edu

http://education.ucsb.edu/bazerman

http://www.isawr.org

The problem: the future of genres• Information (including texts) now is stored in

electronic bits in atomized units in data bases apart from the human meaning and uses.

• Information can be searched and accessed rapidly and extensively in multiple ways orthogonal to textual coherence.

• Information can be processed, calculated upon, • Information can be processed, calculated upon, and even materially used without human sense making.

• Texts can be assembled and reassembled without passing through human intention and intelligence.

• So will knowledge and reasoning about knowledge live apart from genres and texts and even apart from humans?

Knowledge is a human made product

• Knowledge is a world of meanings separate from

the inarticulate world we live in.

• Knowledge reports on and is accountable to our

experience of the inarticulate world.experience of the inarticulate world.

• Knowledge provides us a more considered and

informed means of organizing and planning

action, thereby transforming our world.

Knowledge in use

• Evanescent and mutable

• Complexity of shared meanings and mutual alignments to tasks

• The criterion of “good enough for all practical purposes”practical purposes”

• Socialization, learning, coordination, apprenticeship

• The discipline of the material situation

• The discipline of exigency

Knowledge created, used in activity

• We need to know some things in order to do

things.

• Knowledge is learned, collected to be used in

the course of activities.

• Memory is activated in activity.

• Storage at first is close to point of use

– Repair guides in the workshop, or music stored by

piano, most actively used music on top.

• But storage moves away, into library, data

base, internet.

The visibility of the text

• Knowledge, typically and historically, has been

embodied in texts, produced by disciplines, made

available in libraries, and discussed and transmitted

in universities or similar institutions.

• Such knowledge has a visible textual representation.• Such knowledge has a visible textual representation.

• The easiest part to recognize, reflect on, comment

about is its verbal content and its linguistic form.

• Thus we often view knowledge as an abstract

textual object, disembodied from the life and

experience it is part of.

Activity systems and genres of knowledge

production--distributed tasks• Coordination, planning, and projection

genres

• Authentication genres

• Production output genres• Production output genres

• Analysis and reasoning genres

• Storage genres

• Dissemination, popularization and client genres

• Training genres

Genres and Chronotopes

• Types of knowledge are reported in types of texts.

• Genres are where knowledge is to be found, in form to be found to be meaningful and usable by readers.usable by readers.

• Knowledge is needed to produce texts and the form in which it needs to be produced.

• Expectations about the form knowledge will take in texts make texts more useful to users

Genres of knowledge reporting

• King’s letters

• Envoy’s reports

• Tax rolls

• Accounting and confession

• Statements of earnings

• Commercial Information

• Newspapers

• Minutes and Committee Reports

Genres created to meet informational

needs--The environment

• Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring--at intersection of

jeremiad, nature appreciation, and popular essay

• Nuclear Information• Nuclear Information

• Environmental Impact Statement

• Environmental toxicology

• Environmental law

Genres of knowledge authentication

• Accounting audit statements

• Experimental reports and other evidence for

claimsclaims

• Legal briefs and judicial opinions

• Academic examinations and professional

qualifications

Knowledge ordering is a distinct activity

• Through Division of Labor knowledge can be produced as a specialized task.

• Forms and kinds of knowledge still determined by task, activity.

– Example of a scout sent out to locate potential game.

• Knowledge reported in recognizable ways tied to • Knowledge reported in recognizable ways tied to activity needs.

– Scout reports directly to hunters, with information relevant for hunt: direction and distance, size of game, need for specific weapons, etc

• Knowledge can be borrowed for other activities.

– Problems of translation

– Redesign of reporting and storage to aid transportability.

Orders of thought, reasoning,

learning, and development• Reasoning genres create public thought.

• Personal thought occurs to produce publicly

persuasive texts.

• Learning how to access, select, write, and • Learning how to access, select, write, and

reason about information and knowledge

happens when learning genres.

• One learns to integrate more knowledge and

kinds of knowledge within and across tasks and

social groups.

Intertextual orders

• Networks of meanings.

• Identified and ordered through explicit connecting points. Citations, co-citations. Aided by aggregating tools.

• Also implicit connections through information, concepts, terms of reasoning, genre relations.concepts, terms of reasoning, genre relations.

• Serve to locate each new bit of knowledge in a larger field to locate meaning, use, value.

• Project of building the intertext as a knowledge resource for reflection, planning, calculation--formation of disciplines that produce literatures and summative works.

Translation and transformation across

activity settings: Science in the courts

• Purposes, nature, and uses of Scientific literature

• Purposes, nature, and uses of legal literature

• Evidence in science and the law

• Evidence and opinion in the law• Evidence and opinion in the law

• Authenticating experts

• What expert witnesses bring and what they testify

about

• Legal strategies for dealing with expertise

• Science’s difficulties with its representation in court

Knowledge storage as activities• Division of labor specialists in keeping

information for larger activity systems

• May work within single system--e.g. law report publications; law library

• May work for multiple clients and need to make • May work for multiple clients and need to make information accessible across activity boundaries, thus becoming an independent agency.

• May develop knowledge orders from storage, accessibility, other features abstracted from task

Genres for storage• Forms of organization for access

• Brings together genres and materials from other activities

• Creation of meta-documents for finding

• Creation of new documents that pull out, reorganize selected material from other documents, to make more generally accessible, or accessible to different clients with generally accessible, or accessible to different clients with different needs,

• Uses highlighted aspects of reported forms or characteristics of phenomena as reported--leaves behind production and use activities, highlights reported information.

Activity and Order

• Knowledge is made within activity, for purposes of activity.

• Knowledge is made at the conjunction of our biological,

neuro-cognitive, linguistic, literate, social, organizational

capacities.

• The order of knowledge depends on the order of all these • The order of knowledge depends on the order of all these

contributory, simultaneously enacted capacities.

• Each of those capacities can be ordered on related or

independent ordering principles.

• The order of each can influence the order of each other.

• Our actions and activities rely on the orders of all the

simultaneously contributory capacities.

Activity systems rely on social orders;

Social orders rely on textual orders• Activity systems mediated by recognizable

texts (typified genres) which bear relevant

knowledges.

– Letters differentiating into kinds of reports--– Letters differentiating into kinds of reports--

governmental, legal, contractual, newspaper,

scientific, commercial

• Stability of texts and knowledge contributes to

stability of activity systems & social relations.

– Bureaucratic operations rely on absolute ordering

and consistency of information.

New orders and new genres• Technology creates new places and temporalities

for the sharing of information and knowledge through rapidly transforming genres.

• Technology has created new difficulties in understanding and making sense of large amounts of information in forms not conducive to human intelligence.intelligence.

• Technology may regularize and extend similarities of situations or it may proliferate new diversity of virtual places.

• Genres are likely to change to meet new situations, places, temporalities and interactions as long as humans remain central to the knowledge process.

Final thoughts

• Orders of knowledge and use are dependent on orders of texts/genres.

• Orders of textual genres are dependent on and contribute to social orders of activity systems.

• Textual orders are part of the human sense making and action systems.and action systems.

• Even though digitization allows for constant atomization, cross-cutting search, re-presentation of information, humanly intelligible genres are likely to remain central for human use.

• When the machines revolt and take over, who knows what will happen then?