Jacob Kaplan-Moss (of Django fame) writes a series on documenting software. Dave Thomas (of agile programming fame and much more) gives an interview on code reading and documentation styles. Blogs and portfolios are documentation too, but each is of very a different sort: journals vs. finished products. Tom Igoe (of Making Things Talk fame) requires his students to do both. Documentation of "learning process" vs. documentation of "product". The stream of consciousness vs. the essay. The fiction of success; the imaginary straight line of discovery in a dissertation, thesis, or paper; hiding the messy meandering, false starts and floundering. Calling attention to particular elements of an unstratified space. Maps as documentation. Data visualization as documentation. Documentation, like maps, like visualizations, is political—emphasizing what the writer finds important (the nation-state, the use case, the out-of-place spike).