SCHOOL OF INFORMATION SCIENCES

LIS 3100 SEMINARS IN PROFESSIONAL ISSUES:

Defining Information Ages: A Reading Seminar

Fall 2005

Instructor:          Richard J. Cox

Office:        SIS 648

Office Hours:           Mondays 1:30-4:30

Telephone:           412-624-3245

Email: rcox@mail.sis.pitt.edu or rjcox111@Comcast.net

Course Description and Objectives

The constant reference to our modern era as the “Information Age,” so designated because of the advent of the digital computer and the emergence of a networked society, is not without problems. Many earlier eras were likewise marked by the development and use of new information technologies, and it is imperative that students preparing for academic and research careers in the information sciences fully understand the scholarly, policy, and public debates about the history and evolution of various information ages.

This is a reading seminar, with the objectives being to immerse students into the relevant literature on the nature of the history of the Information Age, as described above, and to assist students to understand how to assess and critique the literature. This course stresses the researching and writing of books ranging across scholarly, professional, and trade publications and orienting students to these publications, their strengths, their weaknesses, and the process by which they are conceived and completed. There will be some journal articles relating to the nature of academic knowledge production, but mostly students will be immersed into the vast monographic literature in the information professions or from other disciplines commenting on information work and technology or with critical significance to these professions. The focus on the production of a scholarly book is deliberate, because it is most like the process of researching and writing a dissertation.

Students will read one book in common for each class session. Each student also will be asked to read three other books (from the “recommended reading” section) for a class session, focusing on thesis, methodology, the author or authors, the reception of the book, the value of it for understanding the nature of information and society and the information professions, and its strengths and weaknesses. Obviously, students will not be expected to read thoroughly each work, but they will be expected to gain a substantial understanding of the book by selective reading and supplementary research (similar for what they might do in preparing for their comprehensive examination).

A purpose of the course is to assist students to construct a substantial knowledge about the nature of the various historical information ages, weaving together archival, library, and information science issues and concepts. Readings will cover such topics as the origins of language; deciphering ancient texts and the advancement of knowledge; reading before and after print; the printing revolution; control, information, and the origins of the modern information era; information and colonial power; the emergence of the modern office; the rise of modern government and the creation and use of records and information systems; the future of print and reading; the networked society; computers and the post-World War Two information revolution; computers and the efficiency of work and organizations; computers, cyberspace, and community; privacy, security, and the modern Information Age; censorship; intellectual property and the modern Information Age; and truth commissions, evidence , and documents.

The course is structured, after a couple of weeks of introductory material on the nature of publication, research, and teaching in the LIS fields, along a chronological scheme, such as Ancient World; Medieval period; Renaissance and Reformation; the Age of Reason; the Nineteenth Century and the Development of a Networked Society; the Progressive Period, 1890-1930; and so forth, right up into the World Wide Web and predictions of the future. As an example, in considering the critical era known as the Progressive Period, we will examine the development of office automation, the emergence of the modern university, the establishment of professions and the era of specialization, the concomitant establishment of the modern museum, archives, and library, the influence of government reform, and the conceiving of new management theories such as Taylorism and scientific management. Two-thirds of the class session time will be devoted to students reporting on and critiquing the readings, and the remainder of the time will be a orientation by the instructor to the readings and the discussion of research themes and opportunities that emerge from the examined scholarship. If the instructor is engaged in or has been in the past engaged in research related to the themes of the readings, he will describe this research.

Assignments and Grading

The course grade will be based on the completion of a research paper and class participation.  Class attendance is mandatory.  This course is a seminar, and class participation is an integral part of the seminar experience.  Doctoral students should come to class prepared to discuss the readings and their own research.  The research paper constitutes 70 percent of the course grade, with participation in class representing the remaining portion of the grade.

The major paper is to be a critical bibliographic assessment of some topic related to the nature of the modern Information Age, the notion of defining what an information age means, or some historical aspect of the modern or previous information age. Students are expected to develop a comprehensive survey about research in their selected topic, covering all the relevant scholarly disciplines, done on any aspect of what the Information Age means. Students should focus their topic in a manner allowing them to investigate it thoroughly, reflecting that they have read the critical scholarly benchmarks, reviews and evaluations of the research, dissertations related to the topic, and assessments of the state of research on their topic. The paper is due on the last day of class (December 6, 2005).  The paper must be submitted both in paper format and electronic format as a Word document (the latter sent as an email attachment to the instructor). The expected length of the paper is 35 pages, and students should use the Chicago Manual of Style as the basis for citations.

Students will not pass the course unless they have satisfactorily met all the requirements described in this syllabus.  Students may opt to take an incomplete provided the following criteria are met: 1)  the instructor is informed of the student's interest or need to do this by week twelve of the course; 2)  the incomplete assignments are completed within four weeks of the end of the course.  Extenuating circumstances or other valid reasons for not making up the course assignments will be considered by the instructor, but the student will be required to provide evidence of the severity of the circumstances preventing the student from completing the assignments.

No incomplete grades will be given for this course, unless there are dramatic or emergency circumstances affecting a student's ability to meet course requirements.  

Students with Disabilities

If you have a disability for which you are requesting an accommodation, you are encouraged to contact both the instructor and the Office of Disability Resources and Services, 216 William Pitt Union – 412-648-7890 or 412-383-7355 (TTY) – as early as possible in the term.  DRS will verify your disability and determine reasonable accommodations for the course.

Week One. August 30, 2005

Introduction to the Course; Introduction of Students; Instructor’s Research Interests and Rationale for the Course

Every issue, no matter how unique it might seem to be in its current manifestation, can be better understood if looked at historically. The notion of the “information age” is an excellent case in point. What has come to be perceived as a hallmark of our particular era is, in fact, the culmination of many economic, social, political, and technological forces. And, of course, what are seen as special characteristics of our own time have their antecedents in times long past. What makes possible the perception of the modern information age is the historical approach, a topic explored in this first seminar session, primarily by the instructor’s discussion of his own evolving historical work.

Recommended Readings

The instructor will discuss his work on themes related to this course as reflected in these writings:

Richard J. Cox, "American Archival History: Its Development, Needs, and Opportunities," American Archivist 46 (Winter 1983): 31-41. 

Richard J. Cox, "On the Value of Archival History in the United States," Libraries & Culture 23 (Spring 1988): 135-51.

Richard J. Cox, "Library History and Library Archives," Libraries & Culture 26 (Fall 1991): 569-93. 

Richard J. Cox, “Drawing Sea Serpents: The Publishing Wars on Personal Computing and the Information Age.” First Monday (May 1998), available at http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue2_8/cox/index.html.

Richard J. Cox, “The Failure or Future of American Archival History:  A Somewhat Unorthodox View,” Libraries & Culture 35 (Winter 2000): 141-154.  Also in Andrew B. Wertheimer and Donald G. Davis, Jr., eds., Library History Research in America: Essays Commemorating the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Library History Round Table (Washington, D.C.: The Center for the Book, Library of Congress, 2000), pp. 141-154.

Richard J. Cox, “The Information Age and History: Looking Backward to See Us,” Ubiquity (26 September-October 4, 2000), available at http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/.

Richard J. Cox, Closing an Era: Historical Perspectives on Modern Archives and Records Management (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 2000).

Richard J. Cox, “Records in the Hands of an Angry God: Jonathan Edwards and Eighteenth Century Records Management,” Records & Information Management Report 19 (November 2003): 7-11.

Richard J. Cox, Lester J. Cappon and the Relationship of History, Archives, and Scholarship in the Golden Age of Archival Theory (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2004).

Week Two September 6, 2005

The Concept of the Information Age

We are bombarded by advertisements telling us that we reside in the Information Age, where we are connected 24/7 to each other, our work, and globally. We are also told that information is power and that the speed by which we acquire information is essential for us to be competitive, even to survive. Yet, we can recognize that all information ages were based on some degree of information and that all information, whether created with stylus and clay or with keyboard and screen, is a technological phenomenon. During this class session we explore the idea of the Information Age historically.

Required Reading

Holbart, Michael E. and Zachary S. Schiffman. Information Ages: Literacy, Numeracy, and the Computer Revolution. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.

Recommended Reading

Castells, Manuel. The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. This is based on Castells’ larger work, The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture, 3 vols. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers, Inc., 1996-1998.

Fischer, Steven Roger. A History of Language. London: Reaktion Books, 1999.

Fischer, Steven Roger. A History of Writing. London: Reaktion Books, 2001.

Fischer, Steven Roger. A History of Reading. London: Reaktion Books, Ltd., 2003.

Manguel, Alberto. A History of Reading. New York: Viking, 1996.

O’Donnell, James J. Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998.

Pacey, Arnold. The Culture of Technology. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983.

Week Three September 13, 2005

The Concept of the Document

There are many ways in which to consider the essence of the various manifestations of information ages, but none quite so powerful as the “document.” The document enables us to look back into the origins of writing, and the foundation required for any sophisticated sense of an information age, but it also allows us to consider many other types of information sources such as artifacts, buildings, cookbooks, diaries, documentaries, landscape, photographs, ruins, and television shows. All of these forms are the result of evolving technologies, but they expand the concept of what is usually associated with the modern information age (built on the back of the digital computer) to encompass many other technologies that reflect the importance and implications of information in earlier eras.

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Required Reading

Levy, David M. Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2001.

Recommended Reading

Bower, Anne L., ed. Recipes for Reading: Community Cookbooks, Stories, Histories. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997.

Bunkers, Suzanne L. and Cynthia A. Huff, eds. Inscribing the Daily: Critical Essays on Women’s Diaries. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996.

Burke, Peter. Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001.

Chartier, Roger, Alain Boureau, and Cecile Dauphin, Correspondence: Models of Letter-Writing from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century, trans. Christopher Woodall. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.

Cutright, Paul Russell. A History of the Lewis and Clark Journals. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1976.

Duguid, Paul and John Seely Brown, The Social Life of Information. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2000.

Edgerton, Gary R. Ken Burns’s America. New York: Palgrave, 2001.

Graver, Lawrence. An Obsession with Anne Frank: Meyer Levin and the Diary. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

Harris, Neil. Building Lives: Constructing Rites and Passages. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.

Harris, Robert. Selling Hitler. New York: Penguin Books, 1986.

Hassam, Andrew. Sailing to Australia: Shipboard Diaries By Nineteenth-Century British Immigrants (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1995).

Hirsch, Julia. Family Photographs: Content, Meaning, and Effect. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981.

Hirsch, Marianne. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997.

Jackson, H. J. Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).

Johnson, Alexandra. The Hidden Writer: Diaries and the Creative Life. New York: Anchor Book, Doubleday, 1997.

Levinson, Sanford. Written in Stone: Public Monuments in Changing Societies. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998.

Lubin, David M. Shooting Kennedy: JFK and the Culture of Images. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.

Manguel, Alberto. Reading Pictures: What We Think About When We Look at Art. New York: Random House, 2002; org. pub. 2000.

Mallon, Thomas. A Book of One’s Own: People and Their Diaries. New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1984.

Mayor, A. Hyatt. Prints and People: A Social History of Printed Pictures. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971.

Price, Mary. The Photograph: A Strange Confined Space. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994.

Sanjek, Roger ed. Fieldnotes: The Makings of Anthropology. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990.

Schlereth, Thomas J. Artifacts and the American Past. Nashville: American Association for State and Local History, 1980.

Schlereth, Thomas J., ed. Material Culture: A Research Guide. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1985.

Schwartz, Hillel. The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles. New York: Zone Books, 1996.

Stabile, Susan M. Memory’s Daughters: The Material Culture of Remembrance in Eighteenth-Century America. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004.

Stilgoe, John R. Outside Lies Magic: Regaining History and Awareness in Everyday Places. New York: Walker and Co., 1998.

Theopano, Janet. Eat My Words: Reading Women’s Lives through the Cookbooks They Wrote. New York: Palgrave, 2002.

Woodward, Christopher. In Ruins. New York: Pantheon Books, 2001.

Week Four September 20, 2005

The Ancient World and the Origins of Writing and Recordkeeping

The mastery of the word (and writing) has been long associated not only with the origins of civilization, but, as well, with the power of political, religious, economic elites. While there are many scholarly interpretations and debates about the nature of early writing and recordkeeping, the notion of power and influence persistently rings through the studies of ancient literacy. In other words, the power associated with information in the digital era is, in many ways, nothing new, and understanding our own present time proceeds from learning something about our predecessors of two to ten thousand tears ago.

Required Reading

Casson, Lionel. Libraries in the Ancient World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001.

Schmandt-Besserat, Denise. "The Earliest Precursor of Writing," in William S-Y. Wang, ed., The Emergence of Language: Development and Evolution (New York: W.H. Freeman and Co., 1991), pp. 31-45.

Recommended Reading

Bottero, Jean. Mesopotamia: Writing, Reasoning, and the Gods. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

Canfora, Luciano. The Vanished Library, trans. Martin Ryle. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.

Dunbar, Robin. Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language. London: Faber and Faber, 1996.

Glassner, Jean-Jacques. The Invention of Cuneiform: Writing in Sumer, translated by Zainab Bahrani and Marc Van De Mieroop. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.

Goody, Jack. The Interface Between the Written and the Oral. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Goody, Jack. The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Goody, Jack. The Power of the Written Tradition. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000.

Harris, William V. Ancient Literacy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989.

Hooker, J. T., ed. Reading the Past: Ancient Writing from Cuneiform to the Alphabet. Berkeley: University of California Press for the Trustees of the British Museum, 1990.

Martin, Henri-Jean. The History and Power of Writing, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.

Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. New York: Routledge, 1988; 1982 reprint.

Posner, Ernst. Archives in the Ancient World. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972.

Shepherd, Margaret. The Art of the Handwritten Note: A Guide to Reclaiming Civilized Communication. New York: Broadway Books, 2002.

Schmandt‑Besserat, Denise. How Writing Came About. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996; abridged edition.

Schniedewind, William M. How the Bible Became a Book: The Textualization of Ancient Isreal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Sickinger, James P. Public Records and Archives in Classical Athens. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.

Thomas, Rosalind. Literacy and Orality in Ancient Greece. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Week Five September 27, 2005

The Medieval World and the Stabilization of the Word and Archive

The medieval era was long characterized as the “dark ages,” the time after the collapse of the Roman Empire when learning was in hiding and superstitions reigned. Actually, this was the time when a reliance on orality shifted to a written culture, recordkeeping systems began to be formalized, and archives and libraries began to develop their modern attributes. Admittedly, the spread of a written culture was slow and learning restricted, but the medieval world was as much a time of information as eras before and after. This was a time, for example, when forgery emerged as a device not to deceive but as a mechanism for being able to produce a written text to legitimate old claims and rights.

Required Reading

Geary, Patrick J. Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1994.

Clanchy, M. T. "'Tenacious Letters': Archives and Memory in the Middle Ages," Archivaria 11 (Winter 1980/81): 115-25.

McCrank, Lawrence J. "Documenting Reconquest and Reform: The Growth of Archives in the Medieval Crown of Aragon," American Archivist 56 (Spring 1993): 256-318.

Recommended Reading

Berkhofer, Robert F., III, Day of Reckoning: Power and Accountability in Medieval France Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.

Boone, Elizabeth Hill and Walter D. Mignolo, eds. Writing Without Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes. Durham: Duke University Press, 1994.

Cahill, Thomas. How the Irish Saved Civilization:  The Untold Story of Ireland’s Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe. (New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1995.

Carruthers, Mary. The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Clanchy, M.T. From Memory to Written Record: England 1066-1307, 2^nd ed. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1993.

Cressy, David. Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.

Fleming, Juliet. Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001.

Illich, Ivan. In the Vineyard of the Text: A Commentary to Hugh’s Didascalion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

Raban, Sandra. A Second Domesday? The Hundred Rolls of 1279-80 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)

Stock, Brian. Listening for the Text: On the Uses of the Past. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990.

There will be no class on October 4, 2005

Week Six October 11, 2005

Renaissance, Printing, and the Birth of Scholarly Communication

The invention of the printing press and the emergence of the printed book are seen by many as epochal moments in human history. In a relatively short time, the word was rapidly duplicated and the birth of modern scholarship, networked intellectual and commercial communities, and modern statecraft all occurred. For someone living in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, the pace of change and the growth of information must have seemed dazzling.

Required Reading

Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. "An Unacknowledged Revolution Revisited," American Historical Review 107 (February 2002): 87-105. [Response to Adrian Johns]

Johns, Adrian. "How to Acknowledge a Revolution," American Historical Review 107 (February 2002): 106- 25. [Part of an exchange with Elizabeth Eisenstein]

Recommended Reading

Crosby, Alfred W. The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250-1600. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. [This is the unabridged version]

Febvre, Lucien and Henri-Jean Martin. The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450-1800, trans. David Gerard; ed. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and David Wootton. London: Verso Editions, 1984; org. Pub. 1958.

Grafton, Anthony. The Footnote: A Curious History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997.

Hiatt, Alfred. The Making of Medieval Forgeries: False Documents in Fifteenth –Century England. London: The British Library and University of Toronto Press, 2004.

Johns, Adrian. The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Love, Harold. The Culture and Commerce of Texts: Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993.

Man, John. Gutenberg: How One Man Remade the World with Words. New York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 2002.

Rowland, Ingrid D. The Scarith of Scornello: A Tale of Renaissance Forgery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.

Zerby, Chuck. The Devil’s Details: A History of Footnotes. Montpelier, Vermont: Invisible Cities Press, 2002.

Week Seven October 18, 2005

The Enlightenment and the Organization of Information

The birth of many disciplines and modernity itself seems connected to the era commonly known as the Enlightenment, extending roughly from the seventeenth century through the next century. The prevailing characteristic of this period, at least among the educated, was that of skepticism about traditional beliefs with a belief in the goodness of humanity and the power of rational thought to lead humanity into perfection. The belief in rationality led to elaborate and pioneering efforts to organize and manage scientific, historical, political, and demographic information. The expansion of the press and publishing industry was a major factor in this era, and the ability to read and to communicate through writing expanded in importance and necessity.

Required Reading

Darnton, Robert. "An Early Information Society: News and the Media in Eighteenth-Century Paris," American Historical Review 105 (February 2000): 1-35.

Lepore, Jill. The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity. New York: Vintage Books, 1999.

Recommended Reading

Brown, Richard D. The Strength of a People: The Idea of an Informed Citizenry in America 1650-1870. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.

Canizares-Esguerra, Jorge. How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2001.

Cohen, Patricia Cline. A Calculating People: The Spread of Numeracy in Early America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.

Gilmore, William J. Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life: Material and Cultural Life in Rural New England, 1780-1835. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989.

Green, Jonathon, Chasing the Sun: Dictionary Makers and the Dictionaries They Made. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1996.

Isaac, Rhys. Landon Carter’s Uneasy Kingdom: Revolution and Rebellion on a Virginia Plantation. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Jones, H. G. For History’s Sake: The Preservation and Publication of North Carolina History 1663-1903. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1966.

Lockridge, Kenneth A. The Diary, and Life, of William Byrd II of Virginia, 1674-1744. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1987.

Maier, Pauline. American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.

Sherman, Stuart. Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form, 1660-1785. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

Sisman, Adam. Boswell’s Presumptuous Task: The Making of the Life of Dr. Johnson. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2000.

Thompson, Peter. Rum Punch & Revolution: Taverngoing & Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.

Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812. New York: Vintage Books, 1990.

Van Tassel, David D. Recording America’s Past: An Interpretation of the Development of Historical Societies in America 1607-1884. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960.

Week Eight October 25, 2005

The Nineteenth Century and the Control of Information

The array of information technology appearing in the nineteenth century, from the telegraph to the telephone and the typewriter to the automatic tabulators, rivals what we witnessed in the second half of the twentieth century. This is the century that was to begin seriously to dream of controlling all societal and government information for the benefit of humanity. It was a time laying the foundation for the emergence of big government, international corporations, and the fantasy of empire (as one scholar considers it).

Required Reading

Beniger, James R. The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986.

Recommended Reading

Anderson, Margo J. The American Census: A Social History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988.

Augst, Thomas. The Clerk’s Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.

Bartlett, Nancy. "Respect des Fonds: The Origins of the Modern Archival Principle of Provenance," Primary Sources & Original Works 1, nos. 1/2 (1991): 107-115.

Maynard Brichford, "The Origins of Modern European Archival Theory," Midwestern Archivist 7, no. 2 (1982): 87-101 and "The Provenance of Provenance in Germanic Areas," Provenance 7 (Fall 1989): 54-70.

Crane, Susan A. Collecting and Historical Consciousness in Early Nineteenth-Century Germany. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000.

Dunlap, Leslie W. American Historical Societies 1790-1860. Madison, Wisconsin: Privately Printed, 1944.

Essinger, James. Jacquard’s Web: How a Hand-Loom Led to the Birth of the Information Age. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Gordon, John Steele. A Thread Across the Ocean: The Heroic Story of the Transatlantic Cable. New York: Walker and Co., 2002.

Henkin, David M. City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.

Hyman, Anthony. Charles Babbage: Pioneer of the Computer. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982.

Jenkins, Reese V. Images and Enterprise: Technology and the American Photographic Industry 1839 to 1925. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1975.

Jones, H. G., ed. Historical Consciousness in the Early Republic: The Origins of State Historical Societies, Museums, and Collections, 1791-1861. Chapel Hill: North Caroliniana Society, Inc. and North Carolina Collection, 1995.

Lord, Clifford, ed. Keepers of the Past. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965.

McNeely, Ian F. The Emancipation of Writing: German Civil Society in the Making, 1790s-1820s. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.

Nash, Ray. American Penmanship 1800-1850: A History of Writing and A Bibliography of Copybooks from Jenkins to Spencer. Worcester: American Antiquarian Society, 1969.

Nickles, David Paul. Under the Wire: How the Telegraph Changed Diplomacy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003.

Richards, Thomas. The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire. London: Verso, 1993.

Sale, Kirkpatrick. .Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution; Lessons for the Computer Age. Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1995.

Schlissel, Lillian. Women’s Diaries of the Westward Journey. New York: Schocken Books, 1982.

Silverman, Kenneth. Lightning Man: The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003.

Standage, Tom. The Turk: The Life and Times of the Famous Eighteenth-Century Chess-Playing Machine. New York: Berkley Books, 2002.

Standage, Tom. The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-line Pioneers. New York: Walker and Co., 1998.

Swade, Doron. The Difference Engine: Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer. New York: Penguin Books, 2002.

Thornton, Tamara Plakins. Handwriting in America: A Cultural History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.

Yates, JoAnne. Control Through Communication: The Rise of System in American Management. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989.

Week Nine November 1, 2005

The Progressive Period and the Formation of the Information Professions

From the late nineteenth century until the end of the first quarter of the twentieth century, America was caught up in a great movement to reform society. Built on the premise that humanity could reform itself, largely through the creation of new government initiatives, the Progressive era brought with it efforts to professionalize the government workforce, create new professions, and legislate changes in all sectors of society. It was the time when many new professions were formed, including that of librarians and archivists, and the first major wave of office technologies utterly transformed work.

Required Reading

Cole, Simon. Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001.

Recommended Reading

Adams, Margaret O’Neill. “Punch Card Records: Precursors of Electronic Records,” American Archivist 58 (Spring 1995): 182-201.

Birdsall, William F., “The American Archivist’s Search for Professional Identity, 1909-1936,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1973.

Conn, Steven.  Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876-1926. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Cook, Terry. “What is Past is Prologue: A History of Archival Ideas Since 1898, and the Future Paradigm Shift,” Archivaria 43 (Spring 1997): 17-63.

Davies, Margery W. Woman’s Place Is at the Typewriter: Office Work and Office Workers 1870-1920. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982.

Fischer, Claude S. America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

Garrison, Dee. Apostles of Culture: The Public Librarian and American Society, 1876-1920 (New York: Free Press, 1979).

Gitelman, Lisa. Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.

Glassberg, David. American Historical Pageantry: The Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century.  Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990.

Gondos, Victor, Jr. J. Franklin Jameson and the Birth of the National Archives 1906-1926. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981.

Hilkey Judy. Character is Capital: Success Manuals and Manhood in Gilded Age America.  Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

Higginbotham, Barbra Buckner. Our Past Preserved: A History of American Library Preservation 1876-1910. Boston: G. K. Hall and Co., 1990.

Lindgren, James M. Preserving Historic New England: Preservation, Progressivism, and the Remaking of Memory. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Reynolds, Robert F. "The Incunabula of Archival Theory and Practice in the United States: J. C. Fitzpatrick's Notes on the Care, Cataloguing, Calendaring and Arranging of Manuscripts and the Public Archives Commission's Uncompleted 'Primer of Archival Economy,'" American Archivist 54 (Fall 1991): 466-82.

Rosenberg, Jane Aikin. The Nation’s Great Library: Herbert Putnam and the Library of Congress, 1899-1939. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993.

Strom, Sharon Hartman. Beyond the Typewriter: Gender, Class, and the Origins of Modern American Office Work, 1900-1930. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992.

Van Slyck, Abigail A. Carnegie Libraries and American Culture 1890-1920. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

Wiegand, Wayne A. The Politics of An Emerging Profession: The American Library Association 1876-1917. New York: Greenwood Press, 1986.

Classic readings about the Progressive Era include

Crunden, Robert M. Ministers of Reform: The Progressives’ Achievement in American Civilization, 1889-1920. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984.

Higham, John. Strangers In the Land: Patterns of American Nativism 1860-1925. New York: Atheneum, 1970.

Hofstadter, Richard. The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. New York: Vintage Books, 1955.

Schlereth, Thomas J. Victorian America: Transformations in Everyday Life 1876-1915. New York: HarperPerennial, 1991.

Wiebe, Robert H. The Search for Order 1877-1920. New York: Hill and Wang, 1967.

Week Ten November 8, 2005

The Emergence of the Modern Office, Computers, and the Post World War Two Information Revolution

The modern computer was born in the midst of war and national emergency. In a relatively brief period of time, the computer moved from large mainframes to personal computers to laptops and other forms of mobile computing. Within a generation, the office was changed and within another generation the computer also had transformed the home. An information revolution had occurred, and the modern Information Age was truly born.

Required Reading

Edwards, Paul N. The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1996.

Recommended Reading

Albrecht, Donald and Chrysanthe B. Broikos, eds. On the Job: Design and the American Office. New York: Princeton Architectural Press and Washington, D.C.: National Building Museum, 2000.

Black, Edwin. IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation. New York: Crown Publishers, 2001.

Bolter, J. David. Turing’s Man: Western Culture in the Computer Age. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984.

Brock, Gerald W. The Second Information Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003.

Campbell-Kelly, Martin and William Aspray. Computer: A History of the Information Machine. New York: Basic Books, 1996.

Kidder, Tracy. The Soul of a New Machine. New York: Avon Books, 1981.

Mattelart, Armand. The Invention of Communication, trans. Susan Emanuel. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1996.

Moody, Fred. I Sing the Body Electronic: A Year With Microsoft on the Multimedia Frontier. New York: Penguin Books, 1995.

Owen, David. Copies in Seconds: How a Lone Inventor and an Unknown Company Created the Biggest Communication Breakthrough Since Gutenberg – Chester Carlson and the Birth of the Xerox Machine. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004.

Petroski, Henry. The Evolution of Useful Things. New York: Vintage Books, 1992.

Petroski, Henry. The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990.

Sellen, Abigail J. and Richard H. R. Harper. The Myth of the Paperless Office. Cambridge: MIT, 2001.

Shurkin, Joel. Engines of the Mind: The Evolution of the Computer from Mainframes to Microprocessors. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1996.

Spar, Debora. Ruling the Waves: Cycles of Discovery, Chaos, and Wealth from the Compass to the Internet. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 2001.

Stork, David G. Hal’s Legacy: 2001's Computer as Dream and Reality. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997.

Von Baeyer, Hans Christian. Information: The New Language of Science. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004.

Webster, Frank. Theories of the Information Society. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Week Eleven November 15, 2005

The Origins of the Internet, the Rise of the Networked Society, and Cyberspace as Community

The chief hallmark of the modern Information Age has been the development of the Internet and the World Wide Web, giving rise to a new kind of virtual community. For many the Web is the quintessential characteristic of what makes our modern era the Information Age, enabling the creation of new digital tools, publications, news sources, entertainment venues, and the display of all human activity and knowledge.

Required Reading

Mitchell, William J. City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995.

Recommended Reading

Agar, Jon. Constant Touch: A Global History of the Mobile Phone. Cambridge, U.K.: Icon Books, 2003.

Dery, Mark. Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century. New York: Grove Press, 1996.

Doheny-Farina, Stephen. The Wired Neighborhood. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.

Graham, Gordon. The Internet: A Philosophical Inquiry. New York: Routledge, 1999.

Hafner, Katie and Matthew Lyon. Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996.

Johnson, Steven. Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate. New York: HarperEdge, 1997.

Levinson, Paul. The Soft Edge: A Natural History and Future of the Information Revolution. New York: Routledge, 1997.

Meyrowitz, Joshua. No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Miller, Steven E. Civilizing Cyberspace: Policy, Power, and the Information Superhighway. New York: ACM Press, 1996.

Mitchell, William J. e-topia: “Urban Life, Jim – But Not As We Know It.” Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000.

Mitchell, William J. ME++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003.

Moore, Dinty. The Emperor’s Virtual Clothes: The Naked Truth About Internet Culture. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1995.

Mosco, Vincent. The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power and Cyberspace. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004.

Negroponte, Nicholas. Being Digital. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995.

Noble, David F. The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.

Norman, Donald A. The Invisible Computer: Why Good Products Can Fail, the Personal Computer Is So Complex, and Information Appliances Are the Solution. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1998.

Oldenburg, Ray. The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community. New York: Marlowe and Co., 1999, rev. ed.

Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. New York: Penguin Books, 1986.

Rabinovitz, Lauren and Abraham Geil, eds. Memory Bytes: History, Technology, and Digital Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.

Rawlins, Gregory J. E. Moths to the Flame: The Seductions of Computer Technology. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996.

Rawlins, Gregory J. E. Slaves of the Machine: The Quickening of Computer Technology. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997.

Reid, Robert H. Architects of the Web: 1,000 Days that Built the Future of Business. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1997.

Rheingold, Howard. Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. New York: Perseus Books, 2002.

Rheingold, Howard. The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. New York: HarperPerennial, 1993.

Rheingold, Howard. Virtual Reality. New York: Touchstone Book, 1991.

Riordan, Michael and Lillian Hoddeson. Crystal Fire: The Birth of the Information Age. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1997.

Roszak, Theodore. The Cult of Information: The Folklore of Computers and the True Art of Thinking. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986.

Rushkoff, Douglas. Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace. New York: Harper San Francisco, 1994.

Rochlin, Gene I. Trapped in the Net: The Unanticipated Consequences of Computerization. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.

Sanders, Barry. A Is for Ox: Violence, Electronic Media, and the Silencing of the Written Word. New York: Pantheon Books, 1994.

Shapiro, Andrew. The Control Revolution: How the Internet Is Putting Individuals in Charge and Changing the World We Know (New York: Public Affairs, 1999).

Slouka, Mark. War of the Worlds: Cyberspace and the High-Tech Assault on Reality. New York: Basic Books, 1995.

Spretnak, Charlene. The Resurgence of the Real: Body, Nature, and Place in a Hypermodern World. Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., Inc., 1997.

Stefik, Mark. Internet Dreams: Archetypes, Myths, and Metaphors. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996.

Stoll, Clifford. Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway. New York: Anchor Books, 1995.

Sunstein, Cass. Republic.com. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.

Swiss, Thomas, ed. Unspun: Key Concepts for Understanding the World Wide Web. New York: New York University Press, 2000.

Tenner, Edward. Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996.

Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995.

Ullman, Ellen. Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1997.

Weinberger, David. Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web. Cambridge: Perseus Publishing, 2002.

Winner, Langdon. The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.

Wresch, William. Disconnected: Haves and Have-Nots in the Information Age. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1996.

Week Twelve November 22, 2005

Privacy, Security, Accountability, and the Modern Information Age

The development of a networked society also has brought new concerns and challenges with personal, organizational, and governmental privacy and security, some of these issues unprecedented in their scope in human history. Individual privacy has become a major concern for many commentators and policymakers, as the new digital technologies seem poised to reveal everything about an individual’s activities, property, beliefs, and work. Security also has come to the fore as the digital networks seem porous to outsiders, hackers, competitors, the mischievous, and, more recently, terrorists. Efforts to secure organizations and governments, often creating new forms of secrecy, also has led to concerns about how accountable government is to its citizens and corporations to its stockholders and society.

Required Reading

Theoharis, Athan G., ed. A Culture of Secrecy: The Government Versus the People’s Right to Know. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998.

Recommended Reading

Bastian, Jeannette Allis. Owning Memory: How a Caribbean Community Lost Its Archives and Found Its History. Westport, Connecticut: Libraries Unlimited, 2003.

Brown, Michael F. Who Owns Native Culture? Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003.

Carp, E. Wayne. Family Matters: Secrecy and Disclosure in the History of Adoption. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998.

Cate, Fred H. Privacy in the Information Age. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1997.

Davis, Shelley L. Unbridled Power: Inside the Secret Culture of the IRS. New York: HarperBusiness, 1997.

Diffie, Whitfield and Susan Landau. Privacy on the Line: The Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998.

Eizenstat, Suart E. Imperfect Justice: Looted Assets, Slave Labor, and the Unfinished Business of World War II. New York: Public Affairs, 2003.

Elliott, A. Larry and Richard J. Schroth. How Companies Lie: Why Enron Is Just the Tip of the Iceberg. New York: Crown Business, 2002.

Ellsberg, Daniel. Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers. New York: Penguin Books, 2002.

Evans, Richard J. Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial. New York: Basic Books, 2001.

Etzioni, Amitai. The Limits of Privacy. New York: Basic Books, 1999.

Etzioni, Amitai. How Patriotic is the Patriot Act? Freedom Versus Security in the Age of Terrorism. New York: Routledge, 2004.

Feldman, Martha S. Order Without Design: Information Production and Policy Making. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989.

Glantz, Stanton A., John Slade, Lisa A. Bero, Peter Hanauer, and Deborah E. Barnes. The Cigarette Papers. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

Godwin, Mike. Cyber Rights: Defending Free Speech in the Digital Age, rev. ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003.

Grimsted, Patricia Kennedy. Trophies of War and Empire: The Archival Heritage of Ukraine, World War II, and the International Politics of Restitution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press for the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2001.

Hixson, Richard F. Privacy in a Public Society: Human Rights in Conflict. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Imber-Black, Evan. The Secret Life of Families: Truth-Telling, Privacy, and Reconciliation in a Tell-All Society. New York: Bantam Books, 1998.

Levin, Itamar. The Last Deposit: Swiss Banks and Holocaust Victims’ Accounts, trans. Natasha Dornberg. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1999.

Lipstadt, Deborah. Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. New York: The Free Press, 1993.

Mitchell, William J. The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Eye. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992.

Moynihan, Daniel Patrick. Secrecy: The American Experience. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.

Palumbo, Michael. The Waldheim Files: Myth and Reality. London: Faber and Faber, 1988.

Parenti, Christian. The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America From Slavery to the War on Terror. New York: Basic Books, 2003.

Perelman, Michael. Class Warfare in the Information Age. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998.

Pool, Ithiel de Sola. Technologies of Freedom. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1983.

Prados, John. The White House Tapes: Eavesdropping on the President. New York: The New Press, 2003.

Prados, John and Margaret Pratt Porter, eds. Inside the Pentagon Papers. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004.

Robins, Natalie. Alien Ink: The FBI’s War on Freedom of Expression. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1992.

Rosen, Jeffrey. The Unwanted Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy in America. New York: Random House, 2000.

Smith, H. Jeff. Managing Privacy: Information Technology and Corporate America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994.

Smith, Janna Malamud. Private Matters: In Defense of the Personal Life. Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., Inc., 1997.

Sykes, Charles J. The End of Privacy. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999.

Toffler, Barbara, with Jennifer Reingold. Final Accounting: Ambition, Greed, and the Fall of Arthur Andersen. New York: Broadway Books, 2003.

Whitaker, Reg. The End of Privacy: Hot Total Surveillance is Becoming a Reality. New York: New Press, 1999.

Week Thirteen November 29, 2005

Censorship and Intellectual Property in the Information Age

Two of the most contentious issues emerging in the modern Information Age have been censorship and the control of intellectual property. Censorship involves many different societal groups, religious bodies, and government and corporate entities in the contest over who gets to determine what is acceptable to see. Intellectual property, originally confined to traditional concerns about copyright, has become a much larger challenge because of the advent of the World Wide Web, e-commerce, and e-government.

Required Reading

Vaidhyanthan, Siva. The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash Between Freedom and Control Is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System. New York: Basic Books, 2004.

Recommended Reading

DelFattore, Joan. What Johnny Shouldn’t Read: Textbook Censorship in America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.

Drahos, Peter and John Braithwaite. Information Feudalism: Who Owns the Knowledge Economy? New York: The New Press, 2002.

Fitzgerald, Frances. America Revised: History Schoolbooks in the Twentieth Century (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1979).

Gans, Herbert J. Deciding What’s News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek, and Time. New York: Vintage Books, 1980.

Goldstein, Paul. Copyright’s Highway: From Gutenberg to the Celestial Jukebox. New York: Hill and Wang, 1994.

Greenawalt, Kent. Fighting Words: Individuals, Communities, and Liberties of Speech. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.

Lapham, Lewis H. Gag Rule: On the Suppression of Dissent and the Stifling of Democracy. New York: Penguin Press, 2004.

Lessig, Lawrence. “Free Culture” How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity. New York: Penguin Press, 2004.

Malcolm, Janet. In the Freud Archives. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984.

Mallon, Thomas. Stolen Words: Forays into the Origins and Ravages of Plagiarism. New York: Penguin Books, 1989.

Minow, Newton N. and Craig L. LaMay. Abandoned in the Wasteland: Children, Television, and the First Amendment. New York: Hill and Wang, 1995.

O’Neil, Robert M. Free Speech in the College Community. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997.

Rabban, David M. Free Speech In Its Forgotten Years. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Ravitch, Diane. The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003.

Rose, Mark. Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Rudenstine, David. The Day the Presses Stopped: A History of the Pentagon Papers Case. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

Saunders, Frances Stonor. The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters. New York: The New Press, 1999.

Schement, Jorge Reina and Terry Curtis. Tendencies and Tensions of the Information Age: The Production and Distribution of Information in the United States. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 1995.

Schiller, Herbert I. Information Inequality: The Deepening Social Crisis in America. New York: Routledge, 1996.

Simpson, Elizabeth, ed. The Spoils of War: World War II and Its Aftermath; The Loss, Reappearance, and Recovery of Cultural Property. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., in association with the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, 1997.

Vaidhyanathan, Siva. Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity. New York: New York University Press, 2001.

Vincent, Isabel. Hitler’s Silent Partners: Swiss Banks, Nazi Gold, and the Pursuit of Justice. New York: William Morrow and Co., Inc., 1997.

Walker, Samuel. Hate Speech: The History of an American Controversy. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994.

Wallace, Jonathan and Mark Mangan, Sex, Laws, and Cyberspace: Freedom and Censorship on the Frontiers of the Online Revolution. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1997.

Wiener, Jon. Historians in Trouble: Plagiarism, Fraud, and Politics in the Ivory Tower. New York: The New Press, 2005.

Yourdon, Ed. Byte Wars: The Impact of September 11 on Information Technology. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, PTR, 2002.

Ziegler, Jean. The Swiss, the Gold, and the Dead, trans. John Brownjohn. New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1998.

Week Fourteen December 6, 2005

Debating the Information Age: The Future of Print and Work

Digital information technologies have transformed how people work and how they access information. Computers, long advocated for their power and efficiency, have been challenged about whether they have made work more economic and efficient, with considerable discussion about the creation of so-called electronic sweatshops where people are constantly connected to work. Over the past couple of decades as well, the printed book’s demise has been promised. These two issues reflect many of the most contentious results of the modern Information Age.

Required Reading

Schiffren, Andre. The Business of Books: How International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read. New York: Verso, 2000.

Recommended Reading

Nicholson Baker, Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper (New York: Random House, 2001).

Birkerts, Sven. The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. Boston: Faber and Faber, 1994.

Bloch, R. Howard and Carla Hesse, eds. Future Libraries. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

Carr, Nicholas G. Does IT Matter? Information Technology and the Corrosion of Competitive Advantage (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2004.

Cox, Richard J. Vandals in the Stacks? A Response to Nicholson Baker’s Assault on Libraries. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002.

Epstein, Jason. Book Business: Publishing Past Present and Future. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2002.

Hamilton, Carolyn, Verne Harris, Jane Taylor, Michele Pickover, Graeme Reid, and Razia Saleh, eds., Refiguring the Archive (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002).

Heim, Michael. Electronic Language: A Philosophical Study of Word Processing. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987.

Kilgour, Frederick G. The Evolution of the Book. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Landauer, Thomas K. The Trouble with Computers: Usefulness, Usability, and Productivity. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995.

McLuhan, Marshall. Essential McLuhan, eds. Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone. New York: Basic Books, 1995.

Marcus, James. Amazonia. New York: The New Press, 2004.

Molz, Redmond Kathleen and Phyllis Dain, Civic Space/Cyberspace: The American Public Library in the Information Age.  Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999.

Nunberg, Geoffrey, ed. The Future of the Book. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

Oppenheimer, Todd. The Flickering Mind: The False Promise of Technology in the Classroom and How Learning Can Be Saved. New York: Random House, 2003.

Peterson, Ivars. Fatal Defect: Chasing Killer Computer Bugs. New York: Vintage Books, 1996.

Petroski, Henry. The Book on the Bookshelf. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999.

Poovey, Mary. A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Sellen, Abigail J. and Richard H. R. Harper. The Myth of the Paperless Office. Cambridge: MIT, 2001.

Wallace, Patricia. The Internet in the Workplace: How New Technology Is Transforming Work. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Waters, Lindsay. Enemies of Promise: Publishing, Perishing, and the Eclipse of Scholarship. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004.

Wilcox, Annie Tremmel. A Degree of Mastery: A Journey Through Book Arts Apprenticeship. New York: Penguin Books, 1999.

Zuboff, Shoshana. In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1988.