Abstract

While considerations of documents and data are longstanding in the tenants and practices of library and information science (LIS), the recent turn toward bodies and embodiment in the social sciences invites a critical interrogation of our assumptions about the interplay of documents, data, and bodies embedded within sociotechnical systems of power and bodily agency. In response, we begin to theorize the intersection of datafication and documentation as documentification, encapsulating how acts of datafication revoking agency results in a one‐directional superficial documentary status, producing assumptions about bodies by power systems which aim to simplify, nullify, and suppress. We initially examine documentification as it relates to practices of surveillance, BMI, and memory institutions. In doing so, we interrogate the ethical dilemmas emerging from assumptions about agency ascribed to documentified bodies. Finally, we challenge the library and information professions to imagine a world designed with putting people first that centers, rather than reduces, their agency.