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,
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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

Kings letters
Envoys 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 Carsons Silent Spring--at intersection of
jeremiad, nature appreciation, and popular essay
Nuclear Information
Environmental Impact Statement
Environmental toxicology
Environmental law

Genres of knowledge authentication

Accounting audit statements
Experimental reports and other evidence for
claims
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

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
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.
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
Authenticating experts
What expert witnesses bring and what they testify
about
Legal strategies for dealing with expertise
Sciences 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
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
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
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-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.
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.
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?