Routledge Handbook of Information History

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.

“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, Professor of English and Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University, USA

• Part I: Introduction1. Situating Information History: The History and Historiography of Information and Its PracticesAlistair Black, Bonnie Mak, Laura Skouvig, and Toni Weller PDFPart II: Visualising, Describing, Expressing2. Information in the Roman EmpireAndrew Riggsby3. Information and Its Forms: Documentary Practices in the Medieval West (Mid-Ninth to Mid-Thirteenth Centuries) Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak4. The Andean Khipus: An Information System Made of StringLucrezia Milillo and Sabine Hyland 5. Racialised Language in Colonial Newspaper Advertisements During the Eighteenth and Nineteenth CenturiesNatália 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 Adler7. Encyclopaedias as Cultural Carriers of Information: A Scandinavian PerspectiveMaria Simonsen8. Paul Otlet’s Experiments with Knowledge Organisation and Explorations of a Future Semantic Web Charles van den Heuvel9. Information as Instruction: A Short History of Attack JournalismBethany Usher10. 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 WorldBrendan Luyt 11. Facial AIs and Information Systems in Historical ContextEdward HiggsPart III: Managing, Ordering, Classifying12. “Those Who Help His Sight and Hearing Are Many”: Information and the State in Early ChinaRebecca Robinson13. Creativity in Classification: Phrasing and Presenting the Aristotelian Categories in the Middle AgesIrene O’Daly14. Trading Factories as Information Factories: Aspects of Information Management in the Dutch East India Company’s Japanese Factory, 1609–1623Gabor Szommer15. The Female Body as an Object of Information: Britain during the Late Victorian and Edwardian PeriodToni Weller16. Information, Topography, and War: Information Management in Britain’s Inter-Service Topographical Department (ISTD) in the Second World War Alistair Black17. The Wartime Social Survey as Information HistoryHenry Irving18. Sensitive Information: Knowing and Preparing for Nuclear War during the Cold WarRosanna Farbøl and Casper Sylvest19. “Men are Engineers, Women Are Computers”: Women and the Information Technology InterregnumAntony Bryant20. Central and Local: A History of Archives in Twentieth-Century EnglandElizabeth Shepherd21. Representing Information in the Western World: Classification, Cataloguing, and the Library Context since IndustrialisationKaren Attar22. The History of Computing: The Development of an Information History FieldWilliam Aspray23. Smart Cities and Informatic Governance: The Management of Information and People in Postcolonial SingaporeHallam Stevens and Manoj Harjani Part IV: Circulating, Networking, Controlling24. The Politics of Communication in the Early Modern City: Istanbul and VeniceFilippo de Vivo25. Recipes, Gold, and Information Exchange: Workshop Cultures in the Early Modern MetropolisJasmine Kilburn-Toppin26. Colonial Political Economies of Information: The East India Company and the Growth of Science in Britain Jessica Ratcliff27. In-Between Writing and Orality: The Circulation of Information in the Black Spanish Caribbean during the Age of Revolutions, 1789–1808 Cristina Soriano28. Information and Mobility: Migrants and Roma as Historical CasesEve Rosenhaft29. Emotions as Commodities: Street Ballads and the Commercialisation of InformationLaura Skouvig30. 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 PoliceValentina Glajar and Corina L. Petrescu 32. Families as Communities of Information. Or: The Importance of Knowing Your RelativesMarkus Friedrich33. Feathers and Formats: Information, Technology, and Homing Pigeons in WarFrank A. Blazich, Jr.34. Information and Communication Theories: A Global History of the (Con)fusion Gabriele Balbi, Gianluigi Negro, Maria Rikitianskaia, Carlos A. Scolari, and Dominique Trudel35. Decolonisation and Information in Postcolonial Egypt, 1952–1967Zoe LeBlanc36. Dynamics of the Human Element in South Africa’s Information HistoryArchie L. Dick Part V: Afterword37. What Is Information History For?Bonnie MakPDF