A new book co-edited by Professor Emeritus Alistair Black and Associate Professor Bonnie Mak, along with Toni Weller (De Montfort University) and Laura Skouvig (University of Copenhagen), provides a field-defining, comprehensive study of information history. The Routledge Handbook of Information History, released last month by Routledge, examines how society, politics, culture, and technology have shaped information practices over millennia. The 638-page volume features more than forty contributors from around the world.
Black and Mak each contributed a chapter in the book and jointly authored the opening chapter which tracks the emergence and development of the field of information history. Black's chapter looks at information management in Britain's Inter-Service Topographical Department during World War II. The book's afterword authored by Mak explains how an analysis of information's past offers surprising insights about humanity.
"Now, more than ever, it is important to understand the ways in which 'information' was conceived and practiced across time and cultures," said Black and Mak in a joint statement. "A broader perspective on information and all its technologies can shed light on emerging developments in generative artificial intelligence, as well as its consequences for society. Although history is often understood as being about 'the past,' this volume demonstrates that history is also about our present and future."
Other iSchool contributors include Assistant Professor Zoe LeBlanc, who authored a chapter on decolonization and information in postcolonial Egypt, and Julia Pollack (MSLIS '12), creative program manager at the University of Illinois' Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, who designed the book's cover.
Black is the author of The Public Library in Britain 1914-2000 and Libraries of Light: British Public Library Design in the Long 1960s as well as co-author of The Early Information Society. He earned his master's degree in social and economic history from the University of London and his doctorate from London Metropolitan University.
Mak is a historian of ancient, medieval, and modern information practices. Her first book, How the Page Matters (University of Toronto Press, 2011), examines the page as a dynamic interface in scrolls, tablets, books, and screens from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century. She holds appointments in the iSchool, Department of History, and Program in Medieval Studies at the University of Illinois. Mak received a PhD in medieval studies from the University of Notre Dame.