"Documents are cultural artifacts with lives and itineraries of their own. While historians have been condemned for treating documents only as “sources,’ they are not alone. Across the disciplines documents and some entity considered “an archive,” have emerged at the center of controversy, political contest, and creative refusal as not before. What has often not been reflected upon is the content lodged in particular documentary forms. Anthropologists once steered clear of documents altogether, passively, sometimes aggressively sharing Claude Levi-Strauss contention that ethnology defines itself by the study of “what is not written.” Neither posture nor approache holds today. Over the last decade has been explosive attention both to visual and written archives, to “paper trails,” to “paper empires” and to the Latin root of documentation, docere, to the coercive and curative “teaching” task that documents and new forms of documentation perform. At issue is, in turn, challenge to the criteria of credibility, evidence, and proof. We’ll address how documents create the realities which they only ostensibly describe. Principles of organization, visual vs. written vs. verbal vs. digital forms of documentation are assigned different values, degrees of proof under specific conditions and at different times. Under the assault of the coronavirus, the graphic has been a crucial form of fact production, proof, dissemination of knowledge and site where the political is being played out and inequities of right and resource are fought over and challenged. Systems of storage and retrieval, forms of reproduction, technological innovation -- all shape the political forces to which they rise. Documentation can be vital technologies of rule in themselves, the apparatus that shape and permeate our lives."