The Routledge Handbook of Information History

by Toni Weller (Editor), Alistair Black (Editor), Bonnie Mak (Editor), Laura Skouvig (Editor)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781032316079
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	07/02/2025
Pages:	638
Product dimensions:	6.88(w) x 9.69(h) x (d)

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

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

Editorial Reviews

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

From the Publisher