Bonnie Mak - Böcker

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.Chapters 1 and 37 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.PDF of Chapter 1.PDF of Chapter 37.Chapters 28 and 34 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

From handwritten texts to online books, the page has been a standard interface for transmitting knowledge for over two millennia. It is also a dynamic device, readily transformed to suit the needs of contemporary readers. In How the Page Matters, Bonnie Mak explores how changing technology has affected the reception of visual and written information.Mak examines the fifteenth-century Latin text Controversia de nobilitate in three forms: as a manuscript, a printed work, and a digital edition. Transcending boundaries of time and language, How the Page Matters connects technology with tradition using innovative new media theories. While historicizing contemporary digital culture and asking how on-screen combinations of image and text affect the way conveyed information is understood, Mak's elegant analysis proves both the timeliness of studying interface design and the persistence of the page as a communication mechanism.

This collection provides a multifaceted response to today’s growing fascination with the idea of the archive and showcases the myriad ways in which archival ideas and practices are being engaged and developed by emerging and internationally renowned scholars. Engaging with Records and Archives offers a selection of original, insightful and imaginative papers from the Seventh International Conference on the History of Records and Archives (I-CHORA 7). The contributions in this volume comprise a wide variety of views of records, archives and archival functions, spanning diverse regions, communities, disciplinary perspectives and time periods. From the origins of contemporary grassroots archival activism in Poland to the role of women archivists in early 20th century England; from the management of records in the Dutch East Indies in the 19th century to the relationship between Western and Indigenous cultures in North America and other modern archival conundrums, this collection reveals the richness of archival thinking through compelling examples from past and present that will captivate the reader. This book will be useful reading for both scholars and practitioners, including archivists, records managers and other media and information professionals. Bridging archival, information, and library science; the digital humanities; art history; social history; culture and media studies; data curation; and communication, students and researchers across the disciplines are sure to find inspiration.