Bureaucratic registers abstracted time and space into comparable units

Evidence

Registers, timetables, training manuals, medical reports and other such bureaucratic, textual devices all share a common characteristic: they attempt to break time and place into similar, comparable, abstract units. As will be seen in the following chapters, once these devices were used time would no longer be measured in terms of the temporal space a given act occupies (e.g. time of harvest, or of learning the Quran), but in abstract, quantifiable units of hours, minutes and seconds. — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 485

Categorization

• XREF: This is a classic measure-of-standardization point echoing James C. Scott’s ‘Seeing Like a State’ legibility arguments.