The Routledge handbook of information history edited by Toni Weller, Alistair Black, Bonnie Mak, Laura Skouvig.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Weller, Toni, editor.

Black, Alistair, editor.

Mak, Bonnie, editor.

Skouvig, Laura, editor.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Information science.

Information science--History.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xxi, 615 pages) : illustrations.

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

London : Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2026.

Summary:

"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 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. Chapter 28 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at https://www-taylorfrancis-com.ezproxy-s1.stir.ac.uk under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license."-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Cover

Half Title

Endorsements

Title Page

Copyright Page

Contents

List of Illustrations

List of Contributors

Preface and Acknowledgements

PART I: Introduction

1. Situating Information History: The History and Historiography of Information and Its Practices

PART II: Visualising, Describing, Expressing

2. Information in the Roman Empire

3. Information and Its Forms: Documentary Practices in the Medieval West (Mid-Ninth to Mid-Thirteenth Centuries)

4. The Andean Khipus: An Information System Made of String

5. Racialised Language in Colonial Newspaper Advertisements During the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

6. "There Must be Something Vicious in the Data": Thomas Jefferson's Techniques of Racialisation in the Production of Data, Facts, and Information

7. Encyclopaedias as Cultural Carriers of Information: A Scandinavian Perspective

8. Paul Otlet's Experiments with Knowledge Organisation and Explorations of a Future Semantic Web

9. Information as Instruction: A Short History of Attack Journalism

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

11. Facial AIs and Information Systems in Historical Context

PART III: Managing, Ordering, Classifying

12. "Those Who Help His Sight and Hearing Are Many": Information and the State in Early China

13. Creativity in Classification: Phrasing and Presenting the Aristotelian Categories in the Middle Ages

14. Trading Factories as Information Factories: Aspects of Information Management in the Dutch East India Company's Japanese Factory, 1609-1623

15. The Female Body as an Object of Information: Britain during the Late Victorian and Edwardian Period.

16. Information, Topography, and War: Information Management in Britain's Inter-Service Topographical Department (ISTD) in the Second World War

17. The Wartime Social Survey as Information History

18. Sensitive Information: Knowing and Preparing for Nuclear War during the Cold War

19. "Men Are Engineers, Women Are Computers": Women and the Information Technology Interregnum

20. Central and Local: A History of Archives in Twentieth-Century England

21. Representing Information in the Western World: Classification, Cataloguing, and the Library Context since Industrialisation

22. The History of Computing: The Development of an Information History Field

23. Smart Cities and Informatic Governance: The Management of Information and People in Postcolonial Singapore

PART IV: Circulating, Networking, Controlling

24. The Politics of Communication in the Early Modern City: Istanbul and Venice

25. Recipes, Gold, and Information Exchange: Workshop Cultures in the Early Modern Metropolis

26. Colonial Political Economies of Information: The East India Company and the Growth of Science in Britain

27. In-Between Writing and Orality: The Circulation of Information in the Black Spanish Caribbean during the Age of Revolutions, 1789-1808

28. Information and Mobility: Migrants and Roma as Historical Cases

29. Emotions as Commodities: Street Ballads and the Commercialisation of Information

30. How Information Changed Between the Late Nineteenth Century and World War II

31. Factual Fictions and Fictionalised Facts in the Reports of the Romanian Secret Police

32. Families as Communities of Information. Or: The Importance of Knowing Your Relatives

33. Feathers and Formats: Information, Technology, and Homing Pigeons in War

34. Information and Communication Theories: A Global History of the (Con)fusion.

35. Decolonisation and Information in Postcolonial Egypt, 1952-1967

36. Dynamics of the Human Element in South Africa's Information History

PART V: Afterword

37. What Is Information History for?

Index.

Notes:

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

1-003-31053-2

1-04-034971-4

9781003310532 (electronic book)

9781003310532

OCLC:

1525621449

Publisher Number:

CIPO000199136