Writing from a new materialist perspective, Kosciejew (2017) proposes the concept of material-documentary literacy, reminding us that one of the main functions of documentation is to materialise information. He points out that ‘information’ is commonly regarded as being an abstract, dematerialised entity, distanced from its materiality which is regarded as secondary. In contrast, he foregrounds the materiality of documentation, to ‘help (re)configure our understanding of information, as something not immaterial and intangible, but something material and tangible’ (Kosciejew 2017: 97). Drawing on Suzanne Briet’s (1951) groundbreaking work on the nature of documentation, and his concept of informative material objects, this paper will examine datafication and data visualisation in higher education, avoiding the limitations of mainstream analyses in educational research so far. The concept of the informative material object allows us to analyse information and data visualiation as material phenomena which are embedded in specific sociomaterial instantiations and enmeshed with human agency, in contrast with the dominant paradigm of data and information being abstract, disembodied entities. This, I propose, is a subtle but important distinction which moves the focus onto the entanglement of human, material, digital and analogue agency which constitutes the ‘datafied’ university.
I will examine a specific case of data visualisation via the production of representations of student engagement via ‘learning analytics dashboards’, a pedagogical practice which has been described in terms of tracing students’ ‘digital footprints’ (Sclater et al. 2016: 4). I will focus on the visual digital tracing of students, discussed via critiques of neoliberal uses of algorithms in society at large (e.g. Aneesh 2009, Beer 2019), of digital higher education (e.g. Prinsloo 2017, Jarke & Breiter 2019, Joksimović, Kovanović & Dawson 2019, Selwyn & Gasevi 2020), and of surveillance studies (e.g. Lyon 2018). I will argue that these critiques and theoretical resources, although invaluable, do not go far enough in their conception of data visualizations’ world-making capacities, in particular, in terms of their constitutive force, focusing particularly on student subjectivities in this case. My argument will be that the act of tracing undertaken via visual representation in learning analytics is an act of documentation in Briet’s terms, which fundamentally shifts how we might understand this educational practice, moving from a notion of surveillance towards a conception of ontological change – even violence – in which the student is rendered into a document. The implications for theory and practice will be discussed.
