Review of Toni Weller, ed. Information History in the Modern World: Histories of the Information Age (original) (raw)
Related papers
The relationship between information and the archive is symbiotic, with each element mutually shaping and influencing the other. This symbiosis unfolded particularly during the early modern period, marked by a significant proliferation of information in diverse forms and genres. Faced with the challenge posed by this influx of information, various political, cultural, and economic entities responded by developing innovative strategies for collecting, analyzing, managing, and utilizing data. This paper focuses on the Medici collection housed at the State Archives of Florence, with a specific emphasis on the “Avvisi” series. Within this extensive collection, a wealth of handwritten news sheets coexists with a substantial number of printed specimens. The analysis delves into the intricate dynamics between handwritten and printed forms, exploring how these different mediums coexist within the archival space. Commencing with a meticulous examination of historical records and the present configuration of the collection, the paper proposes hypotheses behind the organization of the informational material. The paper then delves into the analysis of specific documentary groups, shedding light on the role played by information networks and scrutinizing the fluid movement of texts across different mediums. Expanding the scope, the paper also considers additional archival collections held in the Vatican City, Modena, and Naples, aiming to uncover the nuanced relationship between the archive and the library. This provides insights into how these repositories interact and complement each other in the preservation and dissemination of information. The symbiotic nature of this relationship underscores the significance of archives as dynamic spaces that actively contribute to shaping our understanding of the history of news.
Individual Perceptions: A New Chapter on Victorian Information History
Library History, 2006
Studies in Victorian information history have tended to focus upon the technological or organizational infrastructures and processes of information. This paper takes a different approach and examines four individuals as case studies — the Duke of Wellington, Florence Nightingale, Julius Reuter and Eleanor Sidgwick. Using contemporary archival material it attempts to understand the multifaceted notion of information as it was understood by the Victorians themselves, and in doing so proposes some personal perceptions of information during the nineteenth century. It concludes that information and knowledge played a recognized and varied role in nineteenth century society, but that this role was more subtle and understated than some Victorian information society literature has previously implied
Co-authored with Ann Blair in the Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Europe. Please do not cite this draft, which differs in some places from the final version.
European Modernism and the Information Society: Review Article
Australian Academic & Research Libraries, 2008
European Modernism and the Information Society: informing the present, understanding the future is a collection of chapters about the pioneers of information control and information retrieval. It is recommended reading for those interested in the scholarly conversation about Paul Otlet, Otto Neurath, Patrick Geddes, H. G. Wells, the English Fabians, Suzanne Briet, Wilhelm Ostwald, Franz Maria Feldhaus and L. S. Jast. It is also recommended for several chapters that give an overview of developments in the early Twentieth Century.
2010
The scientific revolution of the 17th century was driven by countless discoveries in Europe and overseas in the observatory, in the library, in the workshop and in society at large. There was a dramatic increase in the amount of information, giving rise to new knowledge, theories and world images. But how were new elements of knowledge picked up, processed, disseminated and – ultimately – accepted in broad circles of the educated community? A consortium of universities, research institutes and cultural heritage institutions has started a project called CKCC1 to meet this research question, building a multidisciplinary collaboratory to analyze a machine-readable and growing corpus of letters of scholars who lived in the 17th-century Dutch Republic. Until the publication of the first scientific journals in the 1660s, letters were by far the most direct and important means of communication between intellectuals. Therefore the 17th-century Republic of Letters offers an ideal case for ex...
Intellectual History Review, 2010
Note‐takers in early modern Europe mixed a number of scribal practices. Not only did they write down extracts of texts, they also collected data from observation or from accounting. Practices such as commonplacing were part of sometimes communal, rather informal personal practices that laid the foundations for personal diaries. Other note‐taking was prescriptive, fact‐establishing technical data entry. Yet both the personal, sentimental and technical forms of note‐taking were interrelated. It was during this period that merchants, administrators, scholars and scientists sought methods to transform raw information such as notes into formalized knowledge for practical use. Notes had formed a part of larger writing and archival projects since the dawn of writing and literacy, but during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, figures such as Bacon, Boyle and Pepys not only mixed note‐taking practices from both scholarly and mercantile traditions; they also thought about the very act of note‐taking and how to transform it into a tool for the management of large‐scale government, industry and research. Most of all, in the seventeenth century, scholars, merchants and naturalists began thinking in formal terms about how to use notes as part of larger information systems which they called collections, compilations and even archives.