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1
Why the card catalog—a "paper machine" with rearrangeable elements—can be regarded as a precursor of the computer.
Today on almost every desk in every office sits a computer. Eighty years ago, desktops were equipped with a nonelectronic data processing machine: a card file. In Paper Machines, Markus Krajewski traces the evolution of this proto-computer of rearrangeable parts (file cards) that became ubiquitous in offices between the world wars.
The story begins with Konrad Gessner, a sixteenth-century Swiss polymath who described a new method of processing... more Why the card catalog—a "paper machine" with rearrangeable elements—can be regarded as a precursor of the computer.
Today on almost every desk in every office sits a computer. Eighty years ago, desktops were equipped with a nonelectronic data processing machine: a card file. In Paper Machines, Markus Krajewski traces the evolution of this proto-computer of rearrangeable parts (file cards) that became ubiquitous in offices between the world wars.
The story begins with Konrad Gessner, a sixteenth-century Swiss polymath who described a new method of processing data: to cut up a sheet of handwritten notes into slips of paper, with one fact or topic per slip, and arrange as desired. In the late eighteenth century, the card catalog became the librarian's answer to the threat of information overload. Then, at the turn of the twentieth century, business adopted the technology of the card catalog as a bookkeeping tool. Krajewski explores this conceptual development and casts the card file as a "universal paper machine" that accomplishes the basic operations of Turing's universal discrete machine: storing, processing, and transferring data. In telling his story, Krajewski takes the reader on a number of illuminating detours, telling us, for example, that the card catalog and the numbered street address emerged at the same time in the same city (Vienna), and that Harvard University's home-grown cataloging system grew out of a librarian's laziness; and that Melvil Dewey (originator of the Dewey Decimal System) helped bring about the technology transfer of card files to business. less 
Ann BlairPaper Machines is a really fun book that’s just been translated into English. It explores the development of the movable slip as a tool of information management. In the 16th century a Swiss bibliographer named Conrad Gesner first recommended slips as a method for indexing books. He recommended collecting the material to index on separate slips, some actually cut out of books and others... (Source)
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2
What does history look like? How do you draw time?
From the most ancient images to the contemporary, the line has served as the central figure in the representation of time. The linear metaphor is ubiquitous in everyday visual representations of time—in almanacs, calendars, charts, and graphs of all sorts. Even our everyday speech is filled with talk of time having a "before" and an "after" or being "long" and "short." The timeline is such a familiar part of our mental furniture that it is sometimes hard to remember that we invented it in the first place. And yet, in its modern... more What does history look like? How do you draw time?
From the most ancient images to the contemporary, the line has served as the central figure in the representation of time. The linear metaphor is ubiquitous in everyday visual representations of time—in almanacs, calendars, charts, and graphs of all sorts. Even our everyday speech is filled with talk of time having a "before" and an "after" or being "long" and "short." The timeline is such a familiar part of our mental furniture that it is sometimes hard to remember that we invented it in the first place. And yet, in its modern form, the timeline is not even 250 years old. The story of what came before has never been fully told, until now.
Cartographies of Time is the first comprehensive history of graphic representations of time in Europe and the United States from 1450 to the present. Authors Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton have crafted a lively history featuring fanciful characters and unexpected twists and turns. From medieval manuscripts to websites, Cartographies of Time features a wide variety of timelines that in their own unique ways—curving, crossing, branching—defy conventional thinking about the form. A fifty-four-foot-long timeline from 1753 is mounted on a scroll and encased in a protective box. Another timeline uses the different parts of the human body to show the genealogies of Jesus Christ and the rulers of Saxony. Ladders created by missionaries in eighteenth-century Oregon illustrate Bible stories in a vertical format to convert Native Americans. Also included is the April 1912 Marconi North Atlantic Communication chart, which tracked ships, including the Titanic, at points in time rather than by theirgeographic location, alongside little-known works by famous figures, including a historical chronology by the mapmaker Gerardus Mercator and a chronological board game patented by Mark Twain. Presented in a lavishly illustrated edition, Cartographies of Time is a revelation to anyone interested in the role visual forms have played in our evolving conception of history. less Ann BlairThis is a beautiful book, wonderfully illustrated with a plethora of examples of how historical time has been visualised across a broad chronological span. The notion of visually representing the passage of time dates back to antiquity. The chapter on Eusebius – how in the fourth century he used tables to match up the biblical account of time with ancient history – is fascinating. In the Middle... (Source)
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3
Guglielmo Cavallo, Roger Chartier, Lydia G. Cochrane | 4.04
Books and other texts have not always been read in the way that we read them today. The modern practice of reading - privately, silently, with the eyes alone - is only one way of reading which, for many centuries, existed alongside other forms. In the ancient world, in the Middle Ages and as late as the 17th century, many texts were written for the voice, and they used forms that were oriented towards the demands of oral performance. This is one of the central themes explored in this account of the changing practices of reading from the ancient world to the present day. An international team... more Books and other texts have not always been read in the way that we read them today. The modern practice of reading - privately, silently, with the eyes alone - is only one way of reading which, for many centuries, existed alongside other forms. In the ancient world, in the Middle Ages and as late as the 17th century, many texts were written for the voice, and they used forms that were oriented towards the demands of oral performance. This is one of the central themes explored in this account of the changing practices of reading from the ancient world to the present day. An international team of leading historians analyses the transformations of reading methods and material over the ages, and shows that revolutions in reading generally precede revolutions of the book. They examine not only the technical innovations which change physical aspects of books and other texts, but also the changing forms of reading and the growth and transformation of the reading public. less Ann BlairThis is a landmark book in the history of reading. In the voices of many different scholars, it offers an excellent introduction to the complexities of trying to understand reading. The history of reading is an offshoot of the history of the book. It’s a field that’s been getting a lot of attention since the 1980s. These historians are trying to uncover who read what when, in what settings, for... (Source)
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4
"Colbert has long been celebrated as Louis XIV's minister of finance, trade, and industry. More recently, he has been viewed as his minister of culture and propaganda. In this lively and persuasive book, Jake Soll has given us a third Colbert, the information manager."
---Peter Burke, University of Cambridge
"Jacob Soll gives us a road map drawn from the French state under Colbert. With a stunning attention to detail Colbert used knowledge in the service of enhancing
royal power. Jacob Soll's scholarship is impeccable and his story long
overdue and compelling." more "Colbert has long been celebrated as Louis XIV's minister of finance, trade, and industry. More recently, he has been viewed as his minister of culture and propaganda. In this lively and persuasive book, Jake Soll has given us a third Colbert, the information manager."
---Peter Burke, University of Cambridge
"Jacob Soll gives us a road map drawn from the French state under Colbert. With a stunning attention to detail Colbert used knowledge in the service of enhancing
royal power. Jacob Soll's scholarship is impeccable and his story long
overdue and compelling."
---Margaret Jacob, University of California, Los Angeles
"Nowadays we all know that information is the key to power, and that the masters of information rule the world. Jacob Soll teaches us that Jean-Baptiste Colbert had grasped this principle three and a half centuries ago, and used it to construct a new kind of state. This imaginative, erudite, and powerfully written book re-creates the history of libraries and archives in early modern Europe, and ties them in a novel and convincing way to the new statecraft of Europe's absolute monarchs."
---Anthony Grafton, Princeton University
"Brilliantly researched, superbly told, and timely, Soll's story is crucial for the history of the modern state."
---Keith Baker, Stanford University
When Louis XIV asked his minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert---the man who was to oversee the building of Versailles and the Royal Academy of Sciences, as well as the navy, the Paris police force, and French industry---to build a large-scale administrative government, Colbert created an unprecedented information system for political power. In The Information Master, Jacob Soll shows how the legacy of Colbert's encyclopedic tradition lies at the very center of the rise of the modern state and was a precursor to industrial intelligence and Internet search engines.
Soll's innovative look at Colbert's rise to power argues that his practice of collecting knowledge originated from techniques of church scholarship and from Renaissance Italy, where merchants recognized the power to be gained from merging scholarship, finance, and library science. With his connection of interdisciplinary approaches---regarding accounting, state administration, archives, libraries, merchant techniques, ecclesiastical culture, policing, and humanist pedagogy---Soll has written an innovative book that will redefine not only the history of the reign of Louis XIV and information science but also the study of political and economic history.
Jacket illustration: Jean Baptiste Colbert (1619–1683), Philippe de Champaigne, 1655, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of the Wildenstein Foundation, Inc., 1951 (51.34). Photograph © 2003 The Metropolitan Museum of Art. less Ann BlairJake Soll’s work is focused on the information management system set up by Louis XIV’s chief minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, in late 17th century France. Soll studies Colbert’s accumulation of archival documents and manuscripts, and how Colbert managed the paperwork of an increasing bureaucracy, as well as the royal library passed down to him by the previous chief minister Jules Mazarin. (Source)
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5
In this book Peter Burke adopts a socio-cultural approach to examine the changes in the organization of knowledge in Europe from the invention of printing to the publication of the French Encyclopedie. The book opens with an assessment of different sociologies of knowledge from Mannheim to Foucault and beyond, and goes on to discuss intellectuals as a social group and the social institutions (especially universities and academies) which encouraged or discouraged intellectual innovation. Then, in a series of separate chapters, Burke explores the geography, anthropology, politics and economics... more In this book Peter Burke adopts a socio-cultural approach to examine the changes in the organization of knowledge in Europe from the invention of printing to the publication of the French Encyclopedie. The book opens with an assessment of different sociologies of knowledge from Mannheim to Foucault and beyond, and goes on to discuss intellectuals as a social group and the social institutions (especially universities and academies) which encouraged or discouraged intellectual innovation. Then, in a series of separate chapters, Burke explores the geography, anthropology, politics and economics of knowledge, focusing on the role of cities, academies, states and markets in the process of gathering, classifying, spreading and sometimes concealing information. The final chapters deal with knowledge from the point of view of the individual reader, listener, viewer or consumer, including the problem of the reliability of knowledge discussed so vigorously in the seventeenth century. One of the most original features of this book is its discussion of knowledges in the plural. It centres on printed knowledge, especially academic knowledge, but it treats the history of the knowledge 'explosion' which followed the invention of printing and the discovery of the world beyond Europe as a process of exchange or negotiation between different knowledges, such as male and female, theoretical and practical, high-status and low-status, and European and non-European. Although written primarily as a contribution to social or socio-cultural history, this book will also be of interest to historians of science, sociologists, anthropologists, geographers and others in another age of information explosion. less Ann BlairThis 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. (Source)
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