As an administrative medium, seems to have only a loose or metaphorical relation to the ways in which scholarly and scientific knowledge is recorded and archive. This was not always the case, however. At earlier moments in the media history humanistic and social-scientific research, protocols were widely used, and transcripts of discussions were sometimes also published. For us, in retrospect the function and utility of such record-keeping is not always clear. The recently published protocols of Adorno’s Frankfurt seminars, for example, stands in contrast with the uses of the protocollary form which were pursed by the research group Poetik und Hermeneutik.
