ANNALS AND JOURNALS OF THE SENATE

DOCUMENTARY MATERIALITY AND AUTHORITY

Abstract

Official legislative publications record and stabilize legislative activity, but their documentary authority depends on material, formal, and institutional operations that do not always remain visible to users. This paper aims to formulate an analytical framework to analyze how different material arrangements of the Annals and Journals of the Brazilian Senate participate in the production of that authority. The investigation, theoretical-analytical in nature and historical-epistemological in orientation, integrates documentary ontology and Contemporary Diplomatics, adopting as methodological procedure a narrative review and a purposive sampling of points of material inflection across the bicentennial arc of official legislative publications. The results propose three documentary regimes: the Regime of Monumentality, associated with the retrospective constitution of the Annals as a printed collection; the Regime of Bureaucratic Industrialization, linked to editorial regularity, standardization, and consultation instruments; and the Regime of Recoverability, marked by the discontinuation of the Annals, the automation of the Journal, and the shift of documentary stabilization toward the active and continuous maintenance of digital environments. This paper concludes that legislative information is converted into institutional authority through historically situated documentary practices.