For a long time, my mental conceptualization of digital documents was that of finalized ones. I thought of finalized videos…finalized slideshows…finalized imagery…finalized articles.

However, after some consideration, I realize that many of my digital documents are transitory and temporal ones. They are raw images, audio, or video clips that get processed into a finalized work. Or they are annotated research documents that feed the research. Or they are sticky notes for feedback on a finalized project. By being transitory, these are dumpable…which means I can rid myself of secondary and tertiary copies once my faculty and administration clients have gotten their versions—their finalized and raw forms.

Enabling Documents

The nature of such enabling digital documents became absolutely clear when I was cleaning out files, and for one article, I probably had some 150 articles that had been read to inform the background information for that article. And in the final cut, only maybe some 30 articles had been relevant enough to be summarized, paraphrased, or quoted.

Ubiquitous Digital Documents

Digital documents are ubiquitous in many work environments. They are used for communications, planning, record-keeping (and institutional memory), and information dissemination. They are eminently transitory and editable. And yet, they’re also very persistent. They may be structured flexibly. They are repurposable in various forms. Some are used for nearly a decade before they’re reformatted or inaccessible due to computer errors or code problems.

So What?

Viewing digital files as transitory and temporal is helping in several ways. First, one is not so protective of digital files—with the idea that once something is captured that it’s in fixed and final form. It’s a lot easier to start new files for scaffolding, planning, and development. There’s not the block of a mental commitment to a file once it is started. It is totally fine to create documents for trial runs and as drafts.