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List 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, Expressing2. Information in the Roman Empire
Andrew Riggsby3. Information and its Forms: Documentary Practices in the Medieval West (Mid-Ninth to Mid-Thirteenth Centuries)
Brigitte M. Bedos-Rezak4. 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 Adler7. Encyclopaedias as Cultural Carriers of Information: A Scandinavian Perspective
Maria 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 Journalism
Bethany 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 World
Brendan Luyt 11. Facial AIs and Information Systems in Historical Context
Edward HiggsPart 3: Managing, Ordering, Classifying12. "Those Who Help His Sight and Hearing are Many:" Information and the State in Early China
Rebecca Robinson13. Creativity in Classification: Phrasing and Presenting the Aristotelian Categories in the
Middle Ages
Irene O'Daly14. Trading Factories as Information Factories: Aspects of Information Management in the Dutch East India Company's Japanese Factory, 1609-1623
Gabor Szommer15. The Female Body as an Object of Information: Britain During the Late Victorian and Edwardian Period
Toni 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 History
Henry Irving18. Sensitive Information: Knowing and Preparing for Nuclear War During the Cold War
Rosanna Farbøl and Casper Sylvest19. "Men are Engineers, Women are Computers." Women and the Information Technology Interregnum
Antony Bryant20. Central and Local: A History of Archives in Twentieth-Century England
Elizabeth Shepherd21. Representing Information in the Western World: Classification, Cataloguing and the Library Context Since Industrialisation
Karen Attar22. The History of Computing: The Development of an Information History Field
William Aspray23. Smart Cities and Informatic Governance: The Management of Information and People in Postcolonial Singapore
Hallam Stevens and Manoj Harjani Part 4: Circulating, Networking, Controlling24. The Politics of Communication in the Early Modern City: Istanbul and Venice
Filippo de Vivo25. Recipes, Gold and Information Exchange: Workshop Cultures in the Early Modern Metropolis
Jasmine 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 Cases
Eve Rosenhaft29. Emotions as Commodities: Street Ballads and the Commercialisation of Information
Laura 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 Police
Valentina Glajar and Corina L. Petrescu 32. Families as Communities of Information. Or: The Importance of Knowing your Relatives
Markus Friedrich33. 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 Trudel35. Decolonisation and Information in Postcolonial Egypt, 1952-1967
Zoe LeBlanc36
. Dynamics of the Human Element in South Africa's Information History
Archie L. Dick Part 5: Afterword37. What is Information History For?
Bonnie Mak
About the author
Toni Weller is a 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 a 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 an 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 an Associate Professor at 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 absolutist Denmark.
