When tech initiatives end, the artifacts they leave behind continue to impact stakeholders. Following an orientation toward broken world thinking, our study introduces the concept of documental afterlives to refer to the range of fates to which these digital artifacts have fallen. In this paper, we systematically review the 118 websites listed in a publicly available database of refugee tech initiatives in Germany as they appear today. We identify that documental afterlives of these projects fall into categories of being broken, unattended, and memorialized. Given the value and impact of these artifacts, we argue that an ethical response to these afterlives requires that we attend to them through stewardship, centering the notion of care and drawing from archival practices. On an empirical level, this paper contributes an updated understanding of how the traces of our initiatives appear long after many of them have ended. Conceptually, our notion of documental afterlives calls on us to attend to the artifacts that we leave behind, recognizing their continued entanglement in social relationships.

This paper uses document theory to analyze Discover, a partially free-to-use application developed by Facebook’s philanthropic initiative Connectivity and released in the Philippines in May 2020. Discover’s design is predicated on the conviction that access to valorized forms of technology—in this case, popular websites viewed via the Internet—promises benefits to marginalized users who are presumed to lack resources needed to fully participate in contemporary informational capitalism. Document theory in HCI provides a framework that allows us to analyze the most popular websites as rendered by Discover. We argue that Discover’s logic of redaction and form moderation reproduces the very structural inequality that access to the Internet frequently claims to ameliorate. We conclude by pointing to potential applications of our approach in research at the intersection of HCI, ICT4D, and political economy.

This paper introduces document theory as a mechanism to analyze intimate platforms as sociotechnical systems. The theory, developed in documentation studies and applied to HCI, focuses on the casting mold or how agents, through particular means and modes, produce documents that govern social relations. We studied the process of creating a profile by identifying and mapping out the fields asked among the ten most popular online dating apps in the US. By looking at dating profiles as documents and their creation as a process of documentation, we argue that the current casting mold of these intimate platforms is designed to extract profit via invisibilization of labor in digital networks leading to the emergence of a constrained rational market agent. Our study illustrates how document theory makes visible the assumptions of technological systems, calling on us to imagine alternatives beyond incremental design changes given broader structural realities of market and power.