HIST 44903
History of Information
Adrian Johns
; 773 702 2334
Winter 2015
Syllabus
Course Outline
It is a commonplace that ours is the “information age.” We spend our time awash in limitless amounts of information, to an extent that is unprecedented in both qualitative and quantitative terms. No previous generation ever enjoyed such ready access to the mass of literature made available by Google, to the volume of images, programming, and music circulated by iTunes and its counterparts, and to the limitless temptations into consumption exemplified by Amazon. We eat where the Net tells us the best food is on offer, and we drive there following the Net’s directions. At the same time, however, no previous generation was as liable to have its reading, listening, consumption, and travel tracked, recorded, data-mined, and commercialized. Recent scandals associated with Edward Snowden, Wikileaks, and media hacking have sharpened public awareness of the extent to which these experiences shape our everyday political, moral, and practical lives, for both good and ill.
Like anything that seems distinctively modern, information in fact emerged through a historical process, and its current form is marked by the legacies of that process. The point of this class is to understand something of how modern information culture came to be. Using examples that range from the Renaissance to the twenty-first century, we shall trace how information has been collected, classified, circulated, contested, and destroyed. We shall also ask how different cultures have tried to comprehend the nature and impact of information in their own times and places. Inevitably, this survey will intrude quite a lot on two closely related topics – communication and media – but it will try to view these topics in terms of their relations to information practices.
The structure of the course is somewhat experimental. It has a loosely chronological framework – events earlier in history tend to crop up earlier in the course. But chronology is in the end less important here than concepts and questions. The overarching structure is focused on those. In each week we shall try to link particular historical moments and events together to suggest longer-term stories. Specifically, I have divided the quarter into two broad categories: infrastructures and themes. The first of these comes from work by the historian Paul Edwards. Edwards suggests that the concept of infrastructure offers a good way to approach the history of information in general. We shall discuss the advantages and drawbacks of this early in the course, but it does suggest a convenient way to organize our initial work. I have provisionally sorted the first few sessions here into a sequence on successive infrastructures, associated with print, physical networks (telegraphy and telephony), ether spaces (radio and television), and digital systems. One of the potential problems with the concept of infrastructure is that it can encourage us to assume that a given structure is self-sustaining and self-explanatory in terms of its mature functionality; we shall try to forestall this by asking how the structures were built up, what alternatives were discarded or absorbed, and how the systems came to be maintained. In the second half of the quarter we shall explore a number of themes that are salient across this history of information infrastructures. Some of these are practical – collecting, sharing, and owning information, for example. Others have to do with norms and identities – such as the roles of counterfeiter, intelligencer, pirate, and police officer. Tackling these will give us an opportunity to see how the practices and personnel of information have changed over the centuries (and sometimes how they have not changed). In the end, we should emerge with an enriched understanding that may be useful in other historical inquiries, as well as casting an unfamiliar light on everyday life in the late-modern world.
Course Requirements
Class sessions
The class meets on Mondays at 10:30-1:20, in CL 405. You are expected to attend these meetings.
Weekly requirements
Students are obviously required to show up to the classes. They are asked to come prepared to talk – I hope to make this a relatively open-format, discussion-based class.
We may ask students to give presentations. If so, each presentation will usually last about 10 minutes, and consist of articulating issues/themes/questions that you think merit discussion in the group. That is, you aren't expected to summarize the readings, except in so far as doing so will help to frame topics for discussion. The presentation is informal – you aren’t expected to read a paper of any kind, and in fact it is better not to read something aloud. Speaking extempore is generally much more effective. You are welcome to do these presentations collaboratively, and to draw connections with your own interests and projects outside of the specific topics of this class.
Final paper
Each student must submit a final paper by the Monday following the end of the reading period. These papers should be submitted electronically. The filename should include the student's own name and the course number (e.g., joe_bloggs_hist44903_final.doc). The format may be MS Word, LibreOffice, or anything else that one of those programs can conventionally accept. The essay itself should have a title, referencing (footnotes or endnotes), and a bibliography. Please do not forget the bibliography. I don’t mind what referencing convention you use, as long as it is internally consistent.
In all cases, deadlines are negotiable in case of something unpredictable, like illness, a family emergency, or a job interview. They are not negotiable if the reason is something predictable, like a sports event or a deadline in another class.
Readings
There is no single textbook for this class, and you are not required to buy any books. But participants could do a lot worse than read James Gleick’s The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood (paperback by Vintage, 2012; originally Pantheon, 2011). It is not an academic book, so if you want chapter and verse on the various topics it tackles then you will need to look elsewhere. But it’s interesting, informative, and accurate as far as I can tell. In addition, although I try not to recommend books by myself, you will find many themes of the course in A. Johns, Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates (Chicago, 2009).
Specific texts are assigned week by week. They can generally be found via the course’s Chalk site, either in the library’s e-reserve system or in the Course Documents section. I have listed a larger number of titles than anyone could reasonably be expected to read for any given week: the intent is to provide a foundation for a more in-depth exploration for those students who want it. If titles bear an asterisk (*) then you should regard them as essential. But the real requirement is a loose and pragmatic one: that you read enough to participate intelligently in the discussion. A good rule of thumb would be to get through about 100 pages per session. You are expected to read a combination of both primary sources and secondary sources, if applicable.
Appointments
My office is in Social Sciences 505. I have office hours on Fridays at 10-12. You are welcome to come by at this time and ask me anything about the course; if you know beforehand, it is a good idea either to write your name on the sheet on the office door or to send me an email. You are also welcome to schedule appointments at other times, although please be aware that my time is quite limited. My phone number is 702-2334. My email address is . Please don’t expect an instant response to emails; in general I try to reply within 24-48 hours, but I can’t promise to be quicker than that. I have a web page at http://home.uchicago.edu/~johns/, which has syllabi and the like. (There is also a page at adrianjohns.com, but I don’t update that very often.) I don’t tweet or blog, and my Facebook page has been dormant for years.
History of Information
Schedule
1 1/5/2015
Preliminary meeting
No reading
This initial meeting is simply to introduce the course, sketch out the schedule for the quarter, and address any issues that may arise at the beginning. There is no preassigned reading. It would be helpful, however, for students to have copies of this syllabus and to have accessed the class’s Chalk site.
2 1/12/2015
Models: Economy, Ecology, Infrastructure, Network (and History)
“Information” is a capacious and rather inchoate concept, so it is necessary at the outset to think carefully about the terms in which to explore its history. That is what we shall do in this session. We shall introduce some of the more influential ways of defining information and rendering it empirically “visible” to the historian. This will include some discussion of theories and models, such as Marshall McLuhan’s notion of media and Latour’s of “immutable mobiles.” How far may we combine elements from these to take advantage of their positive virtues, and how far are they contradictory? The writings we shall deal with cover a range of places and periods, from Renaissance Italy to mid-twentieth century America, but they share a recognition that reflecting explicitly on models and methods is a sine qua non in this field.
* P.N. Edwards et al., “Historical Perspectives on the Circulation of Information,” American Historical Review (December 2011), 1393-1435.
* P.N. Edwards, A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 1-25.
Robert Darnton, “An Early Information Society: News and the Media in Eighteenth-Century Paris,” American Historical Review 105 (2000), 1-35.
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (London: Ark, 1987 [1964]), 89-105 (“Roads and Paper Routes”).
Y. Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 386-459 (the specifics of legal struggles over broadband, etc., may be skimmed).
Filippo De Vivo, Information and Communication in Venice: Rethinking Early Modern Politics (Oxford, 2007), 1-17.
B. Latour, “Visualization and Cognition: Thinking with Eyes and Hands,” Knowledge and Society 6 (1986). 1-40.
Friedrich von Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” American Economic Review 35:4 (September 1945), 519-30.
3 1/19/2015
Infrastructures (1): Print
In this session we shall look at the “information infrastructure” formed around the use of the printing press in Western Europe and north America. (We may also consider the equivalents in Asia, if this proves helpful.) For centuries, the advent of printing in the mid-fifteenth century was taken to be the fundamental dividing line between modernity and everything that went before. There is now an academic discipline, for example, dedicated to the history of books, which took its start from Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin’s l’Apparition du Livre (The Coming of the Book), which was originally published as the mid-point of a 100-volume series devoted to the entire history of humanity. Nowadays we tend to be less positivist than that, but still there is no doubting that the infrastructure of print was a major foundation of western cultures for perhaps half a millennium, and remains so today. So what were/are its distinguishing characteristics, how did they come into being, and what effects can be attributed to them?
* E.L. Eisenstein, “Some Conjectures about the Impact of Printing on Western Society and Thought,” Journal of Modern History 40 (1968), 1-56.
* A. Johns, “The Coming of Print to Europe,” The Cambridge Companion to the History of the Book (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 107-24.
A. Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 43-62.
W.M. Ivins, Prints and Visual Communication (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953), 21-50.
R. Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Cambridge: Polity, 1994), 61-88.
M. Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 1-33.
4 1/26/2015
Infrastructures (2): Physical Networks
In the nineteenth century, network devices began to transfer messages across large distances far faster than print ever could. The telegraph in particular, while not entirely unprecedented (semaphore devices had, in good conditions, achieved remarkable speeds), provided for a rapidity and accuracy of transmission that greatly bolstered the ability of metropolitan governments to rule colonies on the other side of the world. The need to build, maintain, and defend networks suddenly became a mainstay of global politics. But there was an intimate side to telegraphy too – an early novel told a love story carried out at a distance between telegraph operators – and the spread of the networks allowed for the development of new and complex forms of everyday life. These would become more complex with the arrival of telephony towards the end of the nineteenth century. In the early twentieth, new forms of sociability coincided with a new and very controversial politics of patents and big-business, centered on the “octopus” of AT&T.
* I.R. Morus, “‘The Nervous System of Britain’: Space, Time, and the Electric Telegraph in the Victorian Age,” British Journal for the History of Science 33 (2000), 455-475.