Documentary Dissonance Practice

Documentary Dissonance Practice is the branch of Tower archival discipline concerned with the identification, measurement, and management of Documentary Dissonance: the class of ontological discrepancy in which the material history of an artefact, entity, or documented event becomes internally inconsistent or causally unmoored. It is distinguished from Documentary Dissonance itself in the way that medicine is distinguished from illness — the practice has a curriculum, a probationary grade, four recognised schools of interpretation, and a standing quarrel with the Panel of Harmonization that is now in its second century.

The practice is governed, insofar as it is governed at all, by Concordance Prime, whose amendments are issued by Scriptorium Prime and reach working practitioners, on average, eleven weeks after the disputes they were meant to settle have already been settled informally on the floor.

Origins and the Floor 7,001 question

Documentary Dissonance Practice crystallised as a discrete discipline following the procurement irregularities of 1861, when the Miletus Fragment was entered into the manifests as recovered on Floor 7,001 while the shard's own inscription described its discovery in the Subbasement. Neither record could be struck without impugning the other, and the clerks of the period discovered that they possessed no vocabulary for the situation beyond the word error, which did not fit.

The Doctrine of Documentary Realism supplied the missing vocabulary. Its central insistence — that the dissonance itself, and not the physical artefact, is the primary object of concern — converted a species of embarrassment into a species of work. By 1874 the practice had a probationary grade, a small examination, and a locked cupboard of instruments on Floor 412.

The four schools

Practitioners divide, roughly, into four schools. The procuralists hold that dissonance originates in the movement of objects and can be prevented by stricter manifest discipline; the inscriptionalists locate it in text and regard the object as a mere carrier; the metabolic school, which dominates the Documentary Audit service, treats dissonance as a by-product of an entity's documentary metabolism and therefore as natural, chronic, and only ever to be managed; and the sealing school maintains that the condition is contagious and that the correct response is Documentary Sealing at the earliest reading above 2.0 Docons on the Standardized Dissonance Scale.

The schools disagree most sharply over the events of the winter of 1908 on Floor 6,300, when a sealing team closed a reading room before its auditors had finished recording. The auditors' report (Panel of Harmonization, internal minute 1908/44) describes the consequence as "a chamber whose inventory lists a door, and a door whose inventory lists a chamber, and no third document to break the tie" — Panel of Harmonization, Annex 12. It remains the standard cautionary example in the probationary curriculum.

Procedure

Working practice proceeds by reading, comparison, and, where readings exceed 7.3 Chronons on the Scale, referral into mandatory Reconciliation Protocols in accordance with the standing rule on Temporal Dissonance. The rule's companion on Shadow Dissonance was drafted later, is shorter, and is generally conceded to be less useful.

Practitioners are required to record every reading in ink, in the presence of a second practitioner, on a form obtained from the floor on which the reading is taken. Forms obtained elsewhere are void, a rule reaffirmed in Fourth Concordance, Annex 9, and again, in almost identical language, in Seventh Concordance, Annex 2, which practitioners take as evidence that somebody was not listening. Readings taken during a Documentary Review or a cascade audit are exempt from the second-practitioner requirement but may not be used in evidence against the reviewing office.

"A practice that cannot state its own condition is not a practice but a habit with seals."

— Eminence Valca of the Ninth Spiral, Marginalia on Concordance Prime, 1889

Instrumentation and material conditions

The standard kit consists of a comparison frame, two sealed reference tablets, a stylus, and a small wooden wedge whose function is not recorded in any Concordance and which no practitioner has been willing to discard. Documentary Humidity above sixty per cent invalidates all readings regardless of instrument, which is why the practice is thin on the lower floors in spring.

Readings are entered in Docons, with intermediate values recorded to one decimal place and contested values to two. The second decimal place is customarily described by practitioners as "an argument".

Scholarly disagreement

The practice's outstanding dispute concerns whether it is a discipline of prevention or of management. Concordance Prime, Annex 31, describes the practitioner as one who "keeps the record whole", which implies prevention. Concordance Prime, Annex 31, recension B — issued four months later, and identical to recension A in every respect but this sentence — describes the same practitioner as one who "accompanies the record as it comes apart". Citations of Annex 31 are therefore required to specify the recension, and it is a matter of continuing irritation on Floor 412 that the older clerks can remember which recension was in force during any given decade and the probationers cannot.

A related and unresolved question is whether the Documentary Phantom is an object of the practice or a hazard of it. The Archival Hazard register lists phantoms among occupational risks, arising most commonly during a Documentary Review or a cascade audit; the teaching syllabus lists them among findings. When the Panel of Harmonization was asked to settle the point in 1947 it declined, noting that the panel had received the same question in 1911 and that the 1911 papers had not yet been located. The panel's minute records the panel's confidence that they would turn up.