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Historical informatics
Reference:

Discussion club of the journal "Historical Informatics": discussion of the book "Information. Historical Companion"

Volodin Andrey Urievich

PhD in History

Associate Professor at the Department of Historical Inforamation Science in Lomonosov Moscow State University (MSU), Head of Digital Humanities Research Institute at Siberian Federal University (SFU)

119991, Russia, g. Moscow, Lomonosovskii prospekt, 27k4, of. G-423

volodin@hist.msu.ru
Other publications by this author
 

 

DOI:

10.7256/2585-7797.2022.1.37818

Received:

07-04-2022


Published:

11-05-2022


Abstract: This article describes the continuation of the initiative of the editorial board of the journal "Historical Informatics" – a discussion club in which researchers can make reviews of current publications related to the field of interests of historical informatics. The article considers the "main character" of the next online meeting of the discussion club - the collective monograph "Information. Historical Companion" ("Information. A Historical Companion”). Recently, there has been an obvious interest in the interpretation of the concept of "information" in historiography, including in the historical context. Various dictionaries, anthologies and monographs on the "history of information" are becoming frequent novelties of leading international publishers.   The authors of the book "Information. Historical Companion" call their work the first in which such issues are considered comprehensively and in detail, with an attempt to trace global changes in information practices and technologies, although such an optimistic author's self-assessment can be doubted. The main structural elements of the collective monograph-dictionary are considered. The approach chosen by the authors is analyzed in the context of current historiography and various, sometimes competing definitions of the concept of information. L.I.Borodkin, I.M.Garskova, Yu.Yu.Yumasheva, D.S.Voronkova took part in the discussion club meeting, A.Y.Volodin moderated the discussion.


Keywords:

historical informatics, discussion club, information history, information, data, knowledge, keywords, historical companion, information theory, Shannon

This article is automatically translated.

Hominem unius libri timeo

The history of information or "information history" (information history) has become an increasingly defined historiographical direction over the past decade [3, 4]. Thanks to modern technological advances, we now have access to an amazing volume and variety of information flows. But how did information become such an important part of our daily life, and how to see the modern information society in historical retrospect, with an indication of the stages of formation and development of the modern mass media society? The authors of the book "Information. Historical Companion" [1] call their work the first in which such issues are considered comprehensively and in detail, with an attempt to trace global changes in information practices and technologies.

It should be noted that creating dictionaries about information and about the information society has become a trend in English-language literature. As Benjamin Peters writes in the book "Digital Keywords: A Dictionary of Information Society and Culture" (2016): "Keywords encode and decode the language of modern life. They stand guard over the halls of knowledge and power." [5] Synchronously with the historical companion about information, the book "Information. Keywords" [6], and with it also "Information. Textbook" [7] in the Columbia University Press (to be fair, we note that the list of keywords discusses in detail only 15 concepts from algorithm to noise).

The historical companion "Information", according to the editors, explores the question of how information was formed and shaped human society in the past and present. The book offers readers views on history through the prism of information and views on information through the prism of history [1, p. vi]. Thus, the key task of the book is to identify the mutual influences of information and society, how information has influenced society and society has influenced information. The Companion consists of two sections: a collection of articles on the history of information (281 pages) and a large dictionary of information terms (544 pages). The list of terms is conditionally divided into concepts (from data to intellectual property), formats (from horoscopes to databases), genres (from family albums to social media), objects (from bells to office work), professions (from archivists to readers), practices (from accounting to travel), processes (from search to digitalization), systems (from bureaucracy to telecommunications), technologies (from algorithms to woodcuts).

It should be noted that the authors of the companion themselves shy away from defining information, starting from a very imaginative, but not clarifying statement that information is "the name of the era in which we live." The concept of the information society has many co-authors, among whom one can name K. Shannon, N. Wiener, D. von Neumann, A.Turing, A.N.Kolmogorov, and after them such theorists as M. McLuhan, D. Bell, E. Toffler. For this reason, looking at the book "Information" in 2022, you involuntarily wonder: what exactly has changed, has been revealed to us today, what was not known in the middle of the XX century? One of the answers to this question is that there is some fatigue from discussions about data, it doesn't matter so much, big or small, and I want to see information as something more than fragments of the "rock" of the digital era. At the same time, we can agree that in recent years we have seen how information becomes the basis for automating many management decisions, thus beginning to directly affect our lives. But it turns out to be difficult to embed information into a wellknown hierarchy: signal, data, information, knowledge, understanding, because in different contexts information is mixed with data, then with knowledge.

The history of information has received some very successful versions of the presentation, in particular, James Glick's popular science book "Information. History. Theory. Flow" [8], where historical evolution is considered in the context of the scientific movement towards the conventional definition of information, as scientists of the XIX century tried to cope with the concept of energy. In the work under consideration , the authors refer to the generalizing work of Ch .Zins, where there are more than a hundred definitions of key concepts from the triad "data", "information" and "knowledge", presented irreducible to a single definition, regardless of the context of use [9].

At the discussion club meeting, the reviewers expressed a lot of fair critical comments about the book, noting both some inaccuracies and certain liberties. Without repeating these observations, they are published in the same issue of the journal "Historical Informatics", I note an important task that the book coped with: it was possible to draw attention to the problem of historical definition of information (which is still broader than the classical understanding of a historical source in the context of information theory), which means that the question of creating a theory of historical information, which seems quite feasible task for specialists in the field of historical informatics, who have accumulated a wealth of experience in analyzing information that has a chronological reference.

It is not surprising that such a book aroused the interest of the editorial board of the journal "Historical Informatics", and this collective work became the basis for the next meeting of the discussion club, the recording of the online discussion is available on the AIC channel on YouTube [2]. The meeting of the discussion club was attended by a corresponding member. RAS L.I.Borodkin, Doctor of I.N. I.M.Garskova, Doctor of I.N. Yu.Yu.Yumasheva, candidate of D.S.Voronkova, moderated the discussion A.Yu.Volodin.

References
1. Information. A Historical Companion / Edited by Ann Blair, Paul Duguid, Anja-Silvia Goeing, and Anthony Grafton. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021. 904 p.
2. Diskussionnyj klub zhurnala Istoricheskaja informatika: Information: A Historical Companion #2. URL: https://youtu.be/Otyl8HoP8WA
3. Weller T. Information History-An Introduction: Exploring an Emergent Field. Chandos Publishing, 2008. 164 p.
4. Information History in the Modern World: Histories of the Information Age / Edited by Toni Weller. Palgrave, 2011. 208 p.
5. Digital Keywords: A Vocabulary of Information Society and Culture / Edited by Benjamin Peters. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016. 352 p. p. xiii
6. Information: Keywords / Edited by Michele Kennerly, Samuel Frederick, Jonathan E. Abel. Columbia University Press, 2021. 232 p.
7. Information. A Reader / Edited by Eric Hayot, Anatoly Detwyler, Lea Pao. Columbia University Press, 2021. 480 p.
8. Glik J. Informacija. Istorija. Teorija. Potok. M.: Corpus, 2016. 576 c.
9. Zins, C. (2007), Conceptual approaches for defining data, information, and knowledge // Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 58: 479-493. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.20508

Peer Review

Peer reviewers' evaluations remain confidential and are not disclosed to the public. Only external reviews, authorized for publication by the article's author(s), are made public. Typically, these final reviews are conducted after the manuscript's revision. Adhering to our double-blind review policy, the reviewer's identity is kept confidential.
The list of publisher reviewers can be found here.

The article is written in a special genre as a result of the discussion of the book "Information. A Historical Companion", published in 2021 and dedicated to the role of information in history. In fact, this is a handbook for a wide range of historians on the history of information dissemination and information flows in the world, the formation of information technologies and practices. The analysis of the interest and usefulness of this book for readers, including Russian ones, is the subject of this article. The methodology of the article consists in analyzing the text of the book, its structure and main provisions, identifying the strengths and weaknesses of the historical companion. The relevance of the article does not require detailed coverage, since the information aspects of history itself as a science and historical research have been at the forefront in recent years, and any progress in understanding the role and place of information in science and the development of its processing tools (data science, digital information processing technologies, big data, etc.) are instantly "tried on" to history, historical sources and historical research. The novelty of the article is determined primarily by the introduction into scientific circulation of a book that is little known to the Russian reader. The work is written in a companion genre that is unfamiliar to our readers, which can be understood in different ways, not least as a kind of reference for everyone interested in "information history". The genre of the article determined its scope. This is not a review of a book, but rather a way of initially evaluating it as a historical manual. Therefore, the structure of the article is quite clear and obvious. After stating the problem, the author notes that this is not the first reference book on information in English-language literature. Next, the structure of the book is considered, consisting of two blocks review articles and a dictionary. It is noted that the authors shy away from defining the term "information", which is due both to the complexity and basicity of this phenomenon (recall the famous triad "information", "energy", "matter") and the mixing of information, depending on the context, with data and knowledge. Paying tribute to the critical remarks expressed during the discussion about the book, the author of the article believes that the book has coped with the main task to draw attention to the problem of historical definition of information. Therefore, the interest in the historical manual under consideration is quite obvious. The article is written in good scientific language and style and, despite its brevity, gives a general idea of the historical companion. The bibliography of the article is small in volume (9 items), but it is of great interest to readers, since it contains mainly English-language literature on a topic less familiar to the Russian reader. The article is initially focused on scientific discussion and contains a number of critical comments and assessments. In general, the reviewed article contributes to the historiography of interdisciplinary and informational approaches in historical science. It will be useful both for specialists in the field of historical informatics and for a wide range of readers. The article fully corresponds to the format of the journal "Historical Informatics" and is recommended for publication.