"The Routledge Handbook of Information History offers a definitive, inclusive and far-reaching study of how information practices have influenced, and been influenced by, society, politics, culture and technology over past millennia. Information is oftenconsidered a defining characteristic of modern society, but it is far from a modern phenomenon. In the last decades historians have started to ask new questions about how information was understood in the past, suggesting that it has a history which is long, complex and multifaceted. This influential new volume is the first large-scale collection to use the term Information History as its titular focus, situating information within the historiography of the field. It showcases a diverse collection of over forty international contributors who explore information practices from antiquity to the contemporary world, with geographical coverage ranging across Europe, Africa, Asia, as well as North and South America. Including overview essays alongside a wide range of in-depth empirical studies, this ground-breaking collection will appeal to scholars and students in the social sciences, arts and humanities, and offers readers unique insights into how historical practices have influenced the understanding and role of information in our modern world"--
The Routledge Handbook of Information History offers a definitive, inclusive, and far-reaching study of how information practices have influencedand have been influenced by society, politics, culture, and technology over millennia.
Information is often considered a defining characteristic of modern society, but it is far from a modern phenomenon. In the last decades, historians have started to ask new questions about how information was understood in the past, suggesting that it has a history which is long, complex, and multifaceted. This influential new volume is the first large-scale collection to use the term Information History as its titular focus, situating "information" within the historiography of the field. The book showcases a diverse assembly of over forty international contributors who explore information practices from antiquity to the contemporary world, with geographical coverage ranging across Europe, Africa, Asia, as well as North and South America.
Including overview chapters alongside a wide range of in-depth empirical studies, this ground-breaking collection will appeal to scholars and students across the arts, humanities, and social sciences, offering readers unique insights into how historical practices have influenced the understanding and role of information in our modern world.
The Routledge Handbook of Information History offers a definitive, inclusive and far-reaching study of how information practices have influenced, and been influenced by, society, politics, culture and technology over past millennia.
Part 1: Introduction
1. Situating Information History: The History and Historiography of
Information and its Practices
Alistair Black, Bonnie Mak, Laura Skouvig, and Toni Weller
Part 2: Visualising, Describing, Expressing
2. Information in the Roman Empire
Andrew Riggsby
3. Information and its Forms: Documentary Practices in the Medieval West
(Mid-Ninth to Mid-Thirteenth Centuries)
Brigitte M. Bedos-Rezak
4. The Andean Khipus: An Information System Made of String
Lucrezia Milillo and Sabine Hyland
5. Racialised Language in Colonial Newspaper Advertisements During the
Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Natįlia da Silva Perez
6. There Must be Something Vicious in the Data. Thomas Jeffersons
Techniques of Racialisation in the Production of Data, Facts, and Information
Melissa Adler
7. Encyclopaedias as Cultural Carriers of Information: A Scandinavian
Perspective
Maria Simonsen
8. Paul Otlets Experiments with Knowledge Organisation and Explorations of a
Future Semantic Web
Charles van den Heuvel
9. Information as Instruction: A Short History of Attack Journalism
Bethany Usher
10. The Fault Lines of Knowledge: An Examination of the History of
Wikipedias Neutral Point of View (NPOV) Information Policy and its
Implications for a Polarised World
Brendan Luyt
11. Facial AIs and Information Systems in Historical Context
Edward Higgs
Part 3: Managing, Ordering, Classifying
12. Those Who Help His Sight and Hearing are Many: Information and the
State in Early China
Rebecca Robinson
13. Creativity in Classification: Phrasing and Presenting the Aristotelian
Categories in the
Middle Ages
Irene ODaly
14. Trading Factories as Information Factories: Aspects of Information
Management in the Dutch East India Companys Japanese Factory, 1609-1623
Gabor Szommer
15. The Female Body as an Object of Information: Britain During the Late
Victorian and Edwardian Period
Toni Weller
16. Information, Topography and War: Information Management in Britains
Inter-Service Topographical Department (ISTD) in the Second World War
Alistair Black
17. The Wartime Social Survey as Information History
Henry Irving
18. Sensitive Information: Knowing and Preparing for Nuclear War During the
Cold War
Rosanna Farbųl and Casper Sylvest
19. Men are Engineers, Women are Computers. Women and the Information
Technology Interregnum
Antony Bryant
20. Central and Local: A History of Archives in Twentieth-Century England
Elizabeth Shepherd
21. Representing Information in the Western World: Classification,
Cataloguing and the Library Context Since Industrialisation
Karen Attar
22. The History of Computing: The Development of an Information History
Field
William Aspray
23. Smart Cities and Informatic Governance: The Management of Information and
People in Postcolonial Singapore
Hallam Stevens and Manoj Harjani
Part 4: Circulating, Networking, Controlling
24. The Politics of Communication in the Early Modern City: Istanbul and
Venice
Filippo de Vivo
25. Recipes, Gold and Information Exchange: Workshop Cultures in the Early
Modern Metropolis
Jasmine Kilburn-Toppin
26. Colonial Political Economies of Information: The East India Company and
the Growth of Science in Britain
Jessica Ratcliff
27. In Between Writing and Orality: The Circulation of Information in the
Black Spanish Caribbean During the Age of Revolutions, 1789-1808
Cristina Soriano
28. Information and Mobility: Migrants and Roma as Historical Cases
Eve Rosenhaft
29. Emotions as Commodities: Street Ballads and the Commercialisation of
Information
Laura Skouvig
30. How Information Changed Between the Late Nineteenth Century and World War
II
James W. Cortada
31. Factual Fictions and Fictionalised Facts in the Reports of the Romanian
Secret Police
Valentina Glajar and Corina L. Petrescu
32. Families as Communities of Information. Or: The Importance of Knowing
your Relatives
Markus Friedrich
33. Feathers and Formats: Information, Technology and Homing Pigeons in War
Frank Blazich Jr.
34. Information and Communication Theories: A Global History of the
(Con)fusion
Gabriele Balbi, Gianluigi Negro, Maria Rikitianskaia, Carlos Alberto Scolari,
and Dominique Trudel
35. Decolonisation and Information in Postcolonial Egypt, 1952-1967
Zoe LeBlanc
36. Dynamics of the Human Element in South Africas Information History
Archie L. Dick
Part 5: Afterword
37. What is Information History For?
Bonnie Mak
Toni Weller is visiting research fellow in history at De Montfort University, UK. For the past twenty years she has authored numerous books, articles, and book chapters on the theory of information history, women and information, Victorian information culture, as well as the history of the surveillance state.
Alistair Black is professor emeritus in the School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA, but lives and researches in the UK. He has published extensively, over many years, on the history of information management and libraries.
Bonnie Mak is a historian of ancient, medieval, and modern information practices. She is associate professor in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA, and the author of How the Page Matters (2011).
Laura Skouvig is associate professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. She has co-edited Histories of Surveillance from Antiquity to the Digital Era. The Eyes and Ears of Power (2021) and has written about information and surveillance in eighteenth-century Denmark.
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