A Social History of Knowledge

"This book doesn’t actually focus on the term information but it talks about the institutions that made knowledge possible. Its first volume runs “From Gutenberg to Diderot” – in other words, mid-15th to mid-18th century. A second volume stretches “From the Encyclopédie to Wikipedia”, from the mid-18th century to the 21st century. Peter Burke is a great cultural historian who has worked on many different aspects of the transmission of knowledge – including, for example, how historians worked, or how ideas about good behaviour at court were transmitted. In this synthetic pair of books he explores the question: What were the institutions that were collecting, classifying, sorting and disseminating information? In the Middle Ages the clerisy or clerical elite had the corner on learned knowledge by commenting on authoritative texts in Latin at the universities. But by 1600 many other institutions generated information in new ways. Church and state bureaucracy started using questionnaires to gather standardised reports from their jurisdictions. As cities grew, so did the tools they used to spread and collect information, including town criers, notice boards, and putting numbers on houses. There were also new institutions: Academies where elite men with specific interests gathered more or less formally to share and make information, salons in which women played a prominent role as arbiters of taste, coffee houses where people would gather to read and exchange news. The era of the public library didn’t really begin until the 19th century, but there were private membership libraries in the 18th century. These are some of the places where people from different professional origins interacted and exchanged ideas and information in the early modern era. In volume two Burke discusses the rise of the notion of research, which was fostered by universities starting in the 19th century but also by governments which funded large-scale projects. This growth led to the formation of many separate disciplines that became increasingly professionalised and to new institutions formed by governments, such as intelligence agencies and think-tanks. Burke talks about how people in various institutions gathered, classified, deciphered, evaluated, corrected and disseminated knowledge, and how information could be used for policy purposes or not, and how information was hidden, lost, and destroyed – intentionally and not. He offers an overview of the tremendous complexity of factors governing the creation, dissemination and use of knowledge in the modern period. Cultural history is the kind of history with which most of the authors I’m talking about identify themselves. Intellectual history has traditionally focused on major thinkers. By contrast the big moments in cultural history and the history of information in particular are often seemingly small developments, such as the emergence of indexing of various kinds, or of reference books – practices that often aren’t identified with big names or even with any names at all. One of the mantras of cultural history is to emphasise actors’ categories. We try to pay close attention to what the people we study thought they were doing and what habits of information management they used – if they didn’t think about it in our terms, how did they think about it?"