The Routledge Handbook of Information History offers a definitive, inclusive, and far-reaching study of how information practices have influenced—and 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.
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 Natália da Silva Perez 6. “There Must be Something Vicious in the Data.” Thomas Jefferson’s 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 Otlet’s 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 Wikipedia’s “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 O’Daly 14. Trading Factories as Information Factories: Aspects of Information Management in the Dutch East India Company’s 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 Britain’s 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 Farbøl 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 Africa’s Information History Archie L. Dick Part 5: Afterword 37. What is Information History For? Bonnie Mak
Toni Weller is a 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 a 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 an 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 an Associate Professor at 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 absolutist Denmark.
Reviews for The Routledge Handbook of Information History
“Information always has a modern ring to it, but as we enter the AI revolution, we would do well to remember that many of the basic challenges we face today have roots that lead back to antiquity. This essential book shows just how deeply the origins of the modern information revolution are rooted in the past.” Jacob Soll, University Professor and Professor of Philosophy, History, and Accounting, University of Southern California, USA “This is a refreshingly broad compilation, one which offers a provocative look across information-related practices, delving into cultural and historical specificities as a way to ensure that information history emerges at large as a vital area of study.” Lisa Gitelman, New York University, USA
