Dr. Daniela Zetti

CfP and Program

In 1992, the historian Winfried Schulze subjected the source genre of “writing about oneself” to a critical inventory and argued for it to be expanded in the future. Schulze placed so-called ego documents alongside diaries and autobiographies, which contained “statements or statement particles” that provide information “about the voluntary or forced self-perception of a person in his family, his community, his country or his social class”. This also included documents produced by courts and administrations. These documents are of interest to cultural studies and history because they are formats that tell of both the public and the self. The self of life story narration found its way into official documents. Like other auto-reflexive forms of expression, ego documents, in their respective verbalization, in their mediality and socio-historical connection, provide information about knowledge cultures not only of a documented self, but also of a self-producing and reflecting self. Like private and public formats, the hybrid form of the ego document is subject to historical change. With emails and blogs, for example, new forms with (auto)biographical content emerged at the end of the 20th century. It is therefore worth examining the manifestations of the self in relation to knowledge-technology relations in media change. Last but not least, the constantly evolving knowledge formats of self-understanding are an expression of a development that at the same time requires adaptation movements from the production of scientific knowledge.

The interdisciplinary workshop “The documented self. Knowledge cultures and media in transition” starts here 25 years after Schulze's “Approaches to people in history” and asks about the potential and limitations of studies in the history of knowledge and cultural studies that are based on ego documents. The topic of the workshop is, firstly, how cultural studies and history contextualize, interpret and integrate new (auto)biographical genres such as emails and blogs, video recordings (e.g. of interviews) and home stories into scientific knowledge: What changes arise from media changes and technical and media innovations? Do new publication options lead to an expansion of the circle of those “capable of writing history”? Should the category of ego documents be expanded or restricted beyond Schulze’s definition? Secondly, the workshop asks about current and past areas of tension that exist between ego documents and the change in knowledge cultures and media. What knowledge is being negotiated in each case? How is subjectification related to the knowledge medium? What are the relationships between knowledge, medium and document?

See the program here.