Author: James W. Cortada
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538173913
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 462
Get Book Here
Book Description
For over twenty years, James W. Cortada has pioneered research into how information shapes society. In this book he tells the story of how information evolved since the mid-nineteenth century. Cortada argues that information increased in quantity, became more specialized by discipline (e.g., mathematics, science, political science), and more organized. Information increased in volume due to a series of innovations, such as the electrification of communications and the development of computers, but also due to the organization of facts and knowledge by discipline, making it easier to manage and access. He looks at what major disciplines have done to shape the nature of modern information, devoting chapters to the most obvious ones. Cortada argues that understanding how some features of information evolved is useful for those who work in subjects that deal with their very construct and application, such as computer scientists and those exploring social media and, most recently, history. The Birth of Modern Facts builds on Cortada’s prior books examining how information became a central feature of modern society, most notably as a sequel to All the Facts: A History of Information in the United States since 1870 (OUP, 2016) and Building Blocks of Society: History, Information Ecosystems, and Infrastructures (R&L, 2021).
Author: Mary Poovey
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226675181
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 446
Get Book Here
Book Description
How did the fact become modernity's most favored unit of knowledge? How did description come to seem separable from theory in the precursors of economics and the social sciences? Mary Poovey explores these questions in A History of the Modern Fact, ranging across an astonishing array of texts and ideas from the publication of the first British manual on double-entry bookkeeping in 1588 to the institutionalization of statistics in the 1830s. She shows how the production of systematic knowledge from descriptions of observed particulars influenced government, how numerical representation became the privileged vehicle for generating useful facts, and how belief—whether figured as credit, credibility, or credulity—remained essential to the production of knowledge. Illuminating the epistemological conditions that have made modern social and economic knowledge possible, A History of the Modern Fact provides important contributions to the history of political thought, economics, science, and philosophy, as well as to literary and cultural criticism.
Author: Margaret Sanger
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 264
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: Edward Vinski
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527524175
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 99
Get Book Here
Book Description
This book examines the work of William James from the perspective of the educator, as well as the long-term influence he exerted over modern education. While much focus has rightly been given to William James’s other psychological works, many biographers, educators, and historians have not given due attention to his Talks to Teachers on Psychology (1899), resulting in a significant gap in Jamesian studies. This book fills this gap through an analysis of the events and people that brought about the initial lectures long before they appeared in print. In addition to covering James’s early life and education, it also examines the role played by persons such as Harvard President C.W. Eliot, educator Paul Hanus, and philosopher Josiah Royce.
Author: Ludwik Fleck
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022619034X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 232
Get Book Here
Book Description
Originally published in German in 1935, this monograph anticipated solutions to problems of scientific progress, the truth of scientific fact and the role of error in science now associated with the work of Thomas Kuhn and others. Arguing that every scientific concept and theory—including his own—is culturally conditioned, Fleck was appreciably ahead of his time. And as Kuhn observes in his foreword, "Though much has occurred since its publication, it remains a brilliant and largely unexploited resource." "To many scientists just as to many historians and philosophers of science facts are things that simply are the case: they are discovered through properly passive observation of natural reality. To such views Fleck replies that facts are invented, not discovered. Moreover, the appearance of scientific facts as discovered things is itself a social construction, a made thing. A work of transparent brilliance, one of the most significant contributions toward a thoroughly sociological account of scientific knowledge."—Steven Shapin, Science
Author: Isaac Asimov
Publisher: Gramercy
ISBN: 9780517065037
Category : Encyclopedias and dictionaries
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Get Book Here
Book Description
This book presents three thousand unusual, fantastic, and amazing bits of information, presented in almost one hundred different categories, ranging all the way from astronomy to show business, from the ancients to the moderns, and from history to animal life.
Author: William Aspray
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031441346
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 109
Get Book Here
Book Description
Microhistory is a technique that has been used effectively by writers of both fiction and nonfiction. It enables the author to cut through the complexities of large swaths of history by focusing on a particular time and place. Microhistories are particularly useful in historical study when a subfield has recently arisen and there are not yet enough monographic studies from which to draw general patterns. This microhistory focuses on a single year (1920) across the United States, with the goal of understanding the various roles of information in this society. It gives greater emphasis to the informational aspects of traditional historical topics such as farming, government bureaucracy, the Spanish flu pandemic, and Prohibition; and it gives greater attention to information-rich topics such as libraries and museums, schools and colleges, the financial services and office machinery industries, scientific research institutions, and management consultancies.
Author: PiaF. Cuneo
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351576437
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 427
Get Book Here
Book Description
Animals were everywhere in the early modern period and they impacted, at least in some way, the lives of every kind of early modern person, from the humblest peasant to the greatest prince. Artists made careers based on depicting them. English gentry impoverished themselves spending money on them. Humanists exercised their scholarship writing about them. Pastors saved souls delivering sermons on them. Nobles forged alliances competing with them. Foreigners and indigenes negotiated with one another through trading them. The nexus between animal-human relationships and early modern identity is illuminated in this volume by the latest research of international scholars working on the history of art, literature, and of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Germany, France, England, Spain, and South Africa. Collectively, these essays investigate how animals - horses, dogs, pigs, hogs, fish, cattle, sheep, birds, rhinoceroses, even sea-monsters and other creatures - served people in Europe, England, the Americas, and Africa to defend, contest or transcend the boundaries of early modern identities. Developments in the methodologies employed by scholars to interrogate the past have opened up an intellectual and discursive space for - and a concomitant recognition of - the study of animals as a topic that significantly elucidates past and present histories. Relevant to a considerable array of disciplines, the study of animals also provides a means to surmount traditional disciplinary boundaries through processes of dynamic interchange and cross-fertilization.
Author: James W. Cortada
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538131110
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 317
Get Book Here
Book Description
How rumors, lies, and misrepresentations shaped American history After the election of Donald Trump as president, people in the United States and across large swaths of Europe, Latin America, and Asia engaged in the most intensive discussion in modern times about falsehoods pronounced by public officials. Fake facts in their various forms have long been present in American life, particularly in its politics, public discourse, and business activities – going back to the time when the country was formed. This book explores the long tradition of fake facts, in their various guises, in American history. It is one of the first historical studies to place the long history of lies and misrepresentation squarely in the middle of American political, business, and science policy rhetoric. In Fake News Nation, James Cortada and William Aspray present a series of case studies that describe how lies and fake facts were used over the past two centuries in important instances in American history. Cortada and Aspray give readers a perspective on fake facts as they appear today and as they are likely to appear in the future.
Author: Ramananda Chatterjee
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Electronic journals
Languages : en
Pages : 948
Get Book Here
Book Description
Includes section "Reviews and notices of books".
