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Beginning a research project at the Johannesburg City Library in 2013 was the catalyst for the body of work presented here for my Masters dissertation. Since it had been closed for renovations, and reopened in 2012, the Library was filled with boxes of books waiting to be ordered and put away, and old furniture piled up in empty rooms. There was a tension between the structure of the library, an institution whose purpose is to order and classify knowledge, and the state of its contents, which were disorderly and messy. This paradoxical relationship between mess and order is one which I have mobilised in my practical work, and other case studies upon which I have drawn. Through them, I argue that the tension between mess and order can be a productive space for knowledge/artistic production. I look at sites like the Johannesburg City Library as examples that present a strategy for display that I have found to be useful in my practical work. These strategies include presenting piles or heaps of papers, which prompt the viewer to sort through, pick something up, or find something amongst the ‘mess’. I use the term ‘serendipity’ to describe the experience of ‘coming across’ something on one’s own. The serendipitous experience is one that gives the discovered object an air of specialness, something that ‘I have found, that therefore must have some special relationship to me’. A presentation by Shireen Ally on her paper, Material Remains illustrates this point through an anecdote she shared, about the neglected archives of the administration of the former Bantustan, KwaNgane. In my own work I mobilise the fragment as an important tool for freeing text of being bound to one specific meaning. A text read as a singular phrase, can adopt many meanings, often personal, in that they are imagined by the viewer. By freeing text of its contextual ‘order’, one opens possibility for another kind of serendipity, one that is formed through the implication that a piece of text can relate to a viewer in a very personal way. I invoke the theory of performativity in relation to display strategies of mess and fragmentation. A performative speech act is one that changes the ontological status of the subject that is being implicated by the speech act. Because fragmented pieces of text, displayed ‘messily’ do not have prescribed categories (meanings), they enable the viewer to enact his or her own meaning-making. Through this, the fragment comes into being as part of the given category; the ontological status of that phrase is changed through he act of categorising. This reminds us that all categories are in fact constructed and are not inherent to the subject of classification. Here, the form of the Rolodex as a device that holds both my written and practical research embodies the theory of performativity as it allows for pages to be taken out and put back, can be read from any point, facilitating non linearity and fragmentary text. Paradoxically, the Rolodex also performs the function of an ordering mechanism.

This qualitative study, carried out in an early learning center in an international school in Japan, aims to examine the place, meaning, and practice of assessment of young children’s learning through the methodology of documentation as defined and developed by the educators of the Reggio Emilia Approach. Whereas most aspects of instruction and assessment practices focus on individual performances and achievements, this study looks at the learning strategies of young children within the group and the learning of the group and the complexities of assessment practices assigned to socio-cultural theory. The focus of this study, therefore, is framed within socio-cultural theory to look at the intersection of the two, that of group learning and documentation, where the systematic and purposeful documentation of the ways in which groups develop ideas, theories and understanding is given space as being critical to learning of individuals as well as of groups towards building an understanding of assessment from a socio-cultural perspective. Learning is viewed as relevant to experience where the relations between the social and personal (cultural) are shared and that each person learns autonomously and through the ways of learning of others. The study was carried out in the form of action research in the course of one academic year, with the researcher acting as an active participant observer to a group of 4 children and a teacher who formed a learning group through a yearlong project on the concept of color. The teacher was asked to document the process of the salient paths of learning of the children through the project, becoming the ‘documentor’ of the project, and the researcher ‘documenting the documentor’. The main findings suggest to view learning of young children as a web of reciprocal expectations and possibilities of engagement built upon children’s constant mediation between scientific and everyday concepts with and through others.

Evidence from literature indicates prevailing issues in relation to the documentation of software systems. Documentation requires significant effort to create and maintain and this can often reduce the inclination to produce it in a timely manner and to ensure that it remains up to date with the program which code it corresponds to. As a result, documentation is not entirely trusted as a source of consultation during software maintenance tasks. Existing tool support neglects important aspects of detailed design documentation for software systems. This work proposes a design for a novel research tool which provides improved support for the detailed design and documentation of software systems and which addresses the prevailing issues identified. At the core of this tool is a ‘dynamic synchronization’ feature which automates the process of detecting and synchronizing changes between program code and documentation at the level of detailed algorithms in code; preventing them from getting out of date. An evaluation experiment was designed and conducted wherein the research tool was used to complete a series of programming and documentation tasks representing typical software development and code maintenance scenarios. The results show that software developers using the dynamic synchronization feature had a significant 66 percent reduction in the time required to keep their documentation up to date during a code maintenance task (p < 0.01), and a significant 31 percent reduction in the time to complete the maintenance task (p < 0.01). In a questionnaire, they expressed a significant 20 percent higher confidence level that their documentation was an accurate reflection of their code than software developers using non-synchronized forms of documentation (subjective measure, p = 0.03). Further areas of research and development are proposed.