An Information History Decade: A Review of the Literature and Concepts, 2000–2009

Abstract

The field of information history has only been seriously theorized and discussed as an independent area of scholarship over the last ten years or so, and there remains much to be done in order to bring it into the wider academic spotlight. However, during this same period, scholarly work on information in history has been abundant and ever increasing. This article explores some of the key monographs of the past decade which take historical information as their theme. It concludes that, since 2000, not only has there been a growth in the volume of such publications, but also that there has been a growing historiography amongst scholars working in this area. Information history discourse has formed its own identity, and this article offers an exploration of its central characteristics as we come to the end of the first decade of the 2000s.

Understanding information history from a genre‐theoretical perspective

“…Would it not lead to determinism and anachronism? Here Weller presents a necessary and important reminder to this particular problem within the field of history (Weller, ). She stresses that a firm definition of information could be counterproductive in doing historical research on a past society.…”

“…As the Danish media scholar Finnemann () argues, all societies are information societies. But the conception and understanding of information has changed dramatically, especially in the 19th century, presenting a sharp distinction between a pre‐modern and a modern understanding of information (Weller, ). Information is and has always been around, and at the same time it did not exist until recently (Nunberg, ).…”

“…Weller (), a proponent of information theory, has suggested that information history is “the study of information in past societies — how it was understood, used, organised, managed, collected, censored, feared, revered, published, disseminated, presented, displayed” (Weller, , p. 11). The emphasis on the understanding, use, organization, management of information, etc., highlights human agents' actions and activities with information; information in itself does not understand, use, organize, behave, etc.…”

“…Rhetorical genre theory posits that genres are typified rhetorical actions based in recurrent situations and that they codify and communicate specific forms of information in a recurrent response to particular institutionalized social needs (Miller, 1984;Bazerman, 1988, Bakhtin, 1986. Weller (2010), a proponent of information theory, has suggested that information history is "the study of information in past societies -how it was understood, used, organised, managed, collected, censored, feared, revered, published, disseminated, presented, displayed" (Weller, 2010, p. 11). The emphasis on the understanding, use, organization, management of information, etc., highlights human agents' actions and activities with information; information in itself does not understand, use, organize, behave, etc.…”

The total archive: Data, subjectivity, universality

“…The turn, across a range of fields, to ‘histories of information’ is a dramatic instance of the way in which contemporary developments can shape matters of historical concern (Aspray, 2015; Weller, 2010). Ann Blair’s seminal Too Much to Know , for example, used a concept (‘information overload’) developed in the context of debates over human–machine interaction to describe the effect of new discoveries on early-modern intellectual communities (Blair, 2010; Levine, 2017).…”