Practices and artifacts that materialize, circulate, and stabilize relations and traces of knowing-doing in an inquiry. Documentation is an active participant in how phenomena take shape and become legible and accountable in inquiry and assessment.
In postqualitative and new materialist work, documents and documentation are part of the apparatus of inquiry: they help enact what is being studied. Drawing on Haraway’s attention to situated knowledges and technoscientific inscription, documentation is treated as a material-discursive practice that composes worlds, not simply describes them. A syllabus, a consent form, a fieldnote, an LLM prompt log, an annotation layer, or a versioned draft are all documents that gather people, concepts, platforms, histories, and rules into relations that have consequences. They have form, format, timing, and interfaces that shape what can be sensed, remembered, and contested. In Barad’s agential realism, such artifacts participate in agential cuts, the practical separations that make a phenomenon intelligible. Documentation does not sit outside of that process; it is one of the ways those cuts are made and felt.
Thinking with Bowker and Star on classification and infrastructure, documentation is infrastructural: it organizes who and what is recognized, how labor is distributed, what counts as data or evidence, and how accountability is tracked. With Ingold, documents can be understood as lines and traces that continue to grow as they are handled, revised, and recomposed. With Latour and Suchman, inscription devices and plans are technologies that coordinate action, but their effects are contingent on how people and things align around them. In affect theory, following Ahmed and Massumi, documents are also affective conductors: they collect and move intensities, for example when a policy memo produces apprehension or when a rubric calms or sharpens attention. Across these lineages, documentation is a practice of composing relations among humans and nonhumans, not a neutral snapshot of a finished world.
Postqualitative inquiry treats documentation as a situated craft that configures the phenomenon. Research notes, maps, analytic memos, protocols, consent materials, and data displays participate in worlding the study. Decisions about what to inscribe, how to format it, and where it circulates are methodological choices with ethical stakes. Documentation practices become sites for experimenting with diffractive readings, tracing assemblages, and attending to distributed agency. Rather than treating documents as detachable data points, the researcher works with documentation as a living set of relations: generative, partial, accountable, and responsive to participants and materials that co-compose the inquiry.
In AI-entangled writing instruction, documentation practices are central to how authorship, learning, and creativity are enacted. Assignment prompts, policy statements on AI use, platform logs, prompt histories, version control timelines, feedback rubrics, and classroom guidelines are not only background paperwork. They are active elements in the pedagogical assemblage that shape processes, distribute responsibility, and make certain actions legible. For example, documenting composing processes through saved drafts and prompt histories can foreground collaboration between student and model, shifting evaluation from product to process. Carefully designed documentation can also hold space for lived and embodied experiences of instructors and students by inviting reflective traces that register uncertainty, improvisation, and care. In practice, reworking documentation—rewriting a policy to name AI as a participant, redesigning a rubric to include relational creativity, or instituting reflective process logs—reconfigures what counts as legitimate writing and how learning is recognized in the classroom.