I’m giving a talk to a library association this week and thought I’d talk a bit about the history of information. My point will be that the post-computer sense of information is utterly different from the old sense but the new sense is infecting our view of ourselves and our relation to the world.

Among the factoids:

1. I can’t find an instance of Herman Hollerith, inventor of the punch card, referring to the cards as encoding information. In his patent application he talks about recording “data”:

This method consists, essentially: first, in arranging a standard, template or index; second, recording for each individual, unit, person or thing the various statistical data, to be compiled, relating to such person, unit, individual or thing, by punching from or otherwise locating on sheets, strips or cards, index points…”

2. While I knew that Hollerith had been inspired by the way in which some looms were “programmed,” I didn’t know the following:

I was traveling in the West and I had a ticket with what I think was called a punch phonograph. . . the conductor . . . punched out a description of the individual, as light hair, dark eyes, large nose, etc. So you see, I only made a punch photograph of each person.

I like the way this ties holes in a card to the most personal and embodied of the “information” about us: how we look.

3. Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary (1755) defines “information” as follows (according to an interesting academic article by Rafael Capurro):

1. Intelligence given; instruction
2. Charge or accusation exhibited
3. The act of informing or actuation

“Information” at this point wasn’t something separable from the human conversational context.

4. The third definition points to the oldest sense of “information” as something more than what is known. Aristotle thought that the form of a thing impressed itself upon the potential which is the human mind and that is how we come to experience the world. “In-forming” was thus our most basic human relationship to the world, the way in which soul and body met the world itself. That’s a lot different than our abstract sense of information today.

5. There is no N in Hollerith. (Ack. Thanks, Adina.)

Capurro has another article, which I haven’t yet read, called “Hermeneutics and the Phenomenon of Information.” Here’s the abstract:

This paper deals with the perspective of interpretation theory or hermeneutics of the process of information storage and retrieval as it was conceived in the early eighties. Further developments in the information technology as well as a broad international discussion on the hermeneutic paradigm in the information field were added to the original paper from 1986. The main thesis concerns not only the interpretative nature of information-seeking processes but also the role of interpretation with regard to the fragmentation of knowledge. Information is the shape of knowledge at the end of modernity. On the basis of the existential turn of interpretation theory the role of pre-understanding is stressed not only with regard to the information retrieval processes but also to the specific worldly situation in which the inquirers are embedded.

Aw, what the hell, here’s a summary of sorts from the beginning of the article:

First, with regard to the abandonment of the primacy of scientific rationality, information is admitted to be fragmentary, to come in pieces. The fragmentation is two-fold: in reducing knowledge to pieces, the original contextuality disappears or becomes tacit. Knowledge becomes, literally, partial, dependent on prejudices or on the knower’s frame of reference. This relativity of knowledge to a changing horizon of interpretation also brings to the fore of epistemology a new category: that of truth as now, at the end of modernity, inseparable from that of relevance.

Second, with regard to the abandonment of the subjectivity-objectivity opposition, information is described as having a certain commonality. Information is something basically human which should be in principle accessible to everyone. Modern knowledge is something common, shared by a community, for instance by a scientific community.

Third, with regard to the abandonment of the idea that knowledge is something separate from the knower, there is the notion of mediation. Modern information technology disseminates all kinds of knowledge all the time to everyone in a way prefigured by printing. Information becomes part and parcel of media, becomes a medium.

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