Epistemic Object (Document)

In Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents (2014), Gitelman argued that documents should be understood as epistemic objects — artifacts whose specific material properties, institutional contexts, and formal conventions shape what counts as knowledge within the institutional framework the document serves. A birth certificate is not a record of a birth; it is a document that constitutes a legal identity through institutional protocols of certification, filing, and retrieval. A scientific paper is not a report of research; it is a document whose format — abstract, methods, results, discussion — shapes what can be claimed and how the claim is evaluated. The format is not neutral. It is constitutive. It determines what counts as knowledge within the institutional framework that the format serves. AI-generated text is a document in this sense, and the format's inherited epistemic guarantees become newly problematic when the production process no longer matches the format's implications.