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

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 well—known 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.