See ‘getting to the readings‘ for more information on how to access the readings.
| Week 1: 7/4 – 7/8 | Week 2: 7/11 – 7/15 | Week 3: 7/18 – 7/22 |
| Week 4: 7/25 – 7/29 | Week 5: 8/1 – 8/5 | Week 6: 8/8 – 8/12 |
Week 1
Monday, July 4: No Class
Independence Day
Wednesday, July 6
Introduction; What is History of Information, and Why Examine It?
Note: no reading is required in advance of this class.
Slides
Friday, July 8
Technological Determinism; Consequences; Alternatives
Slides
Required reading
- Heilbroner, Robert L. 1994. “Do Machines Make History?”, Technology and Culture 8(3):335-345. (page 3 in reader)
- Marx, Leo. 1997. “Technology: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept“. Social Research, Vol. 64, No. 3. (read online)
Additional reading
- Fischer, C.S. (1992). Chapter 1 ‘Technology and Modern Life‘. America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940. Berkeley, University of California Press.
- Rosen, P. (1993) “The Social Construction of Mountain Bikes: Technology and Postmodernity in the Cycle Industry”. Social Studies of Science, Vol. 23, No. 3 479-513.
Week 2
Monday, July 11
Writing Systems and its cultural effects
* Reading Response #1 due before class *
Slides
Required reading
- McLuhan, Marshall. 1962. “The Galaxy Reconfigured or the Plight of Mass Man in an Individualist Society,” pp 265-279 in The Gutenberg Galaxy: the making of typographic man. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto press. (page 102 in reader)
- Marshack, Alexander. 1999. “The Art and Symbols of Ice-Age Man,” in David Crowley, ed. Communication in History: Technology, Culture, Society. Allyn & Bacon. Pp. 5-14 (page 56 in reader)
Wednesday, July 13
Second cluster on Writing/ Literacy
* SHORT PAPER ASSIGNED, DUE 7/18 *
Slides
Required reading
- Havelock, Eric. “The Coming of Literate Communication to Western Culture,” in Eugene R. Kintgen, Barry M. Kroll, Mike Rose, eds. Perspectives on Literacy. Southern Illinois University, 1988. Pp. 127-134. (page 83 in reader)
- Gough, Kathleen. 1968. Implications of literacy in traditional China and India. In Goody, Jack (ed.). Literacy in Traditional Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 69-84. (page 74 in reader)
Additional material
- Scribner, Silvia and Michael Cole. 1988. “Unpackaging Literacy.” at Social Science Information, 17, 1 (1978)
- Goody, Jack, and Ian Watt. 1963. The Consequences of Literacy. Comparative Studies in Society and History 5(3), 304-345.
Friday, July 15
Manuscript Culture, Archives, and the social implications of organized knowledge
Slides
Required reading
- Plato. 1973/360 bce. Phaedrus & the Seventh & Eighth Letters. W. Hamilton, trans. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Read: “Prelude,” pp 21-26, and then “The inferiority of the written to the spoken word” & “Recapitulation and conclusion,” pp. 95-103.
- Eisenstein, Elizabeth. 1983. “Some Features of Print Culture,” pp 42-91 in Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Week 3
Monday, July 18
Reference books and the organization of knowledge
* SHORT PAPER DUE *
Slides
Required reading
- Alexander, C. 1965. A City is not a Tree.
- Chapter 1. Foundations for “Organizing Systems”, To appear in R. Glushko & C. Borgman (Eds.), The Discipline of Organizing, 2011
Wednesday, July 20
Emergence of the public sphere
Slides
Required reading
- Cowan, Brian. 2005. “Inventing the Coffee House” and “Penny Universities,” pp. 79-112 in The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse. New Haven. Yale University Press.
- Darnton, Robert. 2000. “An Early Information Society: News and the Media in Eighteenth-Century Paris.” American Historical Review 105.1.
Friday, July 22
MIDTERM Exam (90 mins; starts promptly at 10:10)
Week 4
Monday, July 25
Guest Speaker, Jonathan Spira
Overload! How Too Much Information is Hazardous to your Organization
History of Journalism
Slides
Required reading
- Schudson, Michael. 2003. “Where News Came From: The History of Journalism,” Ch. 4 in The Sociology of News, Norton. Pp. 64-89.
Wednesday, July 27
Politics and propaganda
Slides
Required reading
- Marlin, Randall, 2002. “History of Propaganda,” pp. 62-94 in Propaganda and the Ethics of Persuasion, Toronto: Broadview Press.
- Watch the first 10-minute segment of “Divide and Conquer,” one of the “Why We Fight” films that Frank Capra made for the Office of War Information in WWII. (If you want more, there are the other segments on this page.) Watch this brief video on the background of these films.
- Watch the first 7-10 minutes of Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will,” and browse the rest to get the flavor of the rallies — it’s pretty repetitive.
Friday, July 29
Advertising & Photography: technologies of the image
Slides
Required reading
- John Berger, Ways of Seeing
- Newhall, Beaumont. 1964. “Prints from Paper,” “Portraits for the Million,” and “The Faithful Witness,” pp. 31-58, 67-82 in The History of Photography, From 1839 to the Present Day. New York: Museum of Modern Art.
Additional material
- Fradkin, Philip L. 2005. “The Culture of Disasters” pp 263-288 in The Great Earthquake and Firestorms of 1906. University of California Press: Berkeley.
Week 5
Monday, August 1
Broadcast
Slides
Required reading
- Czitrom, Daniel J. 1982. “The Ethereal Hearth: American Radio from Wireless through Broadcasting, 1892-1940” in Media and the American Mind. University of North Carolina Press. Pp. 60-88.
Wednesday, August 3
Narrowcast: telegraph & telephone
Slides
Required reading
- Fischer, Claude S. 1992. Chapter 2 & Chapter 3 “The Telephone in America.” The Social History of the Telephone to 1940. University of California Press. Berkeley. pp 33-86
Friday, August 5
Exam preparation (optional, please come prepared)
Week 6
Monday, August 8
Advent of the computer
Slides
Required reading
- Campbell-Kelly, Martin & William Aspray. 1996. “‘Babbage’s Dream Comes True,” (pp. 53-104) in Martin Campbell-Kelly & William Aspray, Computer: A History of the Information Machine. New York: Basic Books.
- Menabrea, L.F. 1842. Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage, trans. Ada Augusta, Countess of Lovelace. [read the final paragraph before the “Notes by the translator. It begins “Now, admitting that such an engine …” and ends “… such an undertaking.”]
- Berners-Lee, Tim. 2000. Chapters 1-3, pp. 1-34 in Weaving the Web. New York City: HarperCollins.
Additional material
- Babbage, Charles. 1835. “Registering Operations” and “On the Division of Mental Labour,” chapters 8 & 20 in On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures.
- Watch: Englebart, Douglas. 1968. “Doug Englebart 1968 Demo.” On MouseSite.
Wednesday, August 10
Advent of the computer, continued
Slides
Recommended readings
- Web science: an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the web. Hendler et al. (2008) (available through Library proxy)
- Long Live the Web: A Call for Continued Open Standards and Neutrality. Tim Berners-Lee (2010).
Friday, August 12
FINAL Exam (starts promptly at 10:10)