Beyond the Facts

With Beyond the Facts, Cortada adds to his previous body of work on the history of information, facts and knowledge, this time focusing on the more abstract, but equally significant, concept of tacit knowledge. Cortada uses a mix of personal anecdote and experience from his decades within business and academia, alongside study of an array of published sources, to provide a fresh look at our understandings of “the world of the tacit”. In so doing, Beyond the Facts offers a timely and unique perspective on this lesser explored aspect of information scholarship. -- Toni Weller * Visiting Research Fellow in History, De Montfort University, UK, and co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Information History. * This book is about tacit knowledge. It is a kind of implicit, how-to knowledge. While we use it every day, and it is invaluable in learning a new skill or in working effectively with others, it is devilishly hard to define and analyze. Philosophers and management scholars have studied it extensively, but their writing is often difficult to follow because of its specialized language and abstruse concepts. The author of this book, who holds a PhD but spent 30 years in business, has read and digested the relevant scholarly literature, and has written about tacit knowledge in understandable language using everyday examples. -- William Aspray, Senior Research Fellow, Charles Babbage Institute Tacit knowledge, once the domain of a priesthood of philosophers, later captivated psychologists, ethnographers, computer scientists, and managers. Cortada’s history of tacit knowledge is insightful and intriguing at every turn. His book is especially vital as AI (neural net) bots—which lack tacit knowledge and data contexts—have moved from labs into our lives. -- Jeffrey R. Yost, Director, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota