McNeely presents a compact history of Western culture via the institutions that have shaped knowledge from the classical period to the present.

A dazzling intellectual history of the West served up with verve and insight by two brilliant young historians. Here is an intellectual entertainment, a sweeping history of the key institutions that have organized knowledge in the West from the classical period onward. With elegance and wit, this exhilarating history alights at the pivotal points of cultural transformation. The motivating question throughout: How does history help us understand the vast changes we are now experiencing in the landscape of knowledge?Beginning in Alexandria and its great center of Hellenistic learning and imperial power, we then see the monastery in the wilderness of a collapsed civilization, the rambunctious universities of the late medieval cities, and the thick social networks of the Enlightenment republic of letters. The development of science and the laboratory as a dominant knowledge institution brings us to the present, seeking patterns in the new digital networks of knowledge.Full of memorable characters, this fresh history succeeds in restoring the strangeness and the significance of the past.

In The Demise of the Library School, Richard J. Cox places the present and future of professional education for librarianship in the debate on the modern corporate university. The book is a series of meditations on critical themes relating to the education of librarians, archivists, and other information professionals, playing off of other commentators analyzing the nature of higher education and its problems and promises.

Ehrlich reveals how the East India Company used its commitment to knowledge to justify its commercial and political power.

‘The Internet is broken and Paolo Bory knows how we got here. In a powerful book based on original research, Bory carefully documents the myths, imaginaries, and ideologies that shaped the material and cultural history of the Internet. As important as this book is to understand our shattered digital world, it is essential for those who would fix it.’ — Vincent Mosco, author of The Smart City in a Digital World The Internet Myth retraces and challenges the myth laying at the foundations of the network ideologies – the idea that networks, by themselves, are the main agents of social, economic, political and cultural change. By comparing and integrating different sources related to network histories, this book emphasizes how a dominant narrative has extensively contributed to the construction of the Internet myth while other visions of the networked society have been erased from the collective imaginary. The book decodes, analyzes and challenges the foundations of the network ideologies looking at how networks have been imagined, designed and promoted during the crucial phase of the 1990s. Three case studies are scrutinized so as to reveal the complexity of network imaginaries in this decade: the birth of the Web and the mythopoesis of its inventor; and the histories of two Italian networking projects, the infrastructural plan Socrate and the civic network Iperbole, the first to give free Internet access to citizens. The Internet Myth thereby provides a compelling and hidden sociohistorical narrative in order to challenge one of the most powerful myths of our time. This title has been published with the financial assistance of the Fondazione Hilda e Felice Vitali, Lugano, Switzerland.

In American History in Transition, Yoshinari Yamaguchi provides fresh insights into early efforts in American history writing, ranging from Jeremy Belknap’s Massachusetts Historical Society to Emma Willard’s geographic history and Francis Parkman’s history of deep time to Henry Adams’s thermodynamic history. Although not a well-organized set of professional researchers, these historians shared the same concern: the problems of temporalization and secularization in history writing. As the time-honored framework of sacred history was gradually outdated, American historians at that time turned to individual facts as possible evidence for a new generalization, and tried different “scientific” theories to give coherency to their writings. History writing was in its transitional phase, shifting from religion to science, deduction to induction, and static to dynamic worldview.

The first volume to introduce the techniques and methods of reading digital material for researchDigital Humanities has become one of the new domains of academe at the interface of technological development, epistemological change, and methodological concerns. This volume explores how digital material might be read or utilized in research, whether that material is digitally born as fanfiction, for example, mostly is, or transposed from other sources. The volume asks questions such as what happens when text is transformed from printed into digital matter, and how that impacts on the methods we bring to bear on exploring that technologized matter, for example in the case of digital editions. Issues such as how to analyse visual material in digital archives or Twitter feeds, how to engage in data mining, what it means to undertake crowd-sourcing, big data, and what digital network analyses can tell us about online interactions are dealt with. This will give Humanities researchers ideas for doing digitally based research and also suggest ways of engaging with new digital research methods. Key featuresFirst volume centred on the navigation and interpretation of digital material as research methods in the HumanitiesUp-to-date analyses of issues and methods including big data, crowdsourcing, digital network analysis, working with digital additionsBased on actual research projects such as para-textual work with fanfiction, reading twitter, different kinds of distant and close readings

How, despite thirty years of effort, Soviet attempts to build a national computer network were undone by socialists who seemed to behave like capitalists. Between 1959 and 1989, Soviet scientists and officials made numerous attempts to network their nation—to construct a nationwide computer network. None of these attempts succeeded, and the enterprise had been abandoned by the time the Soviet Union fell apart. Meanwhile, ARPANET, the American precursor to the Internet, went online in 1969. Why did the Soviet network, with top-level scientists and patriotic incentives, fail while the American network succeeded? In How Not to Network a Nation, Benjamin Peters reverses the usual cold war dualities and argues that the American ARPANET took shape thanks to well-managed state subsidies and collaborative research environments and the Soviet network projects stumbled because of unregulated competition among self-interested institutions, bureaucrats, and others. The capitalists behaved like socialists while the socialists behaved like capitalists. After examining the midcentury rise of cybernetics, the science of self-governing systems, and the emergence in the Soviet Union of economic cybernetics, Peters complicates this uneasy role reversal while chronicling the various Soviet attempts to build a “unified information network.” Drawing on previously unknown archival and historical materials, he focuses on the final, and most ambitious of these projects, the All-State Automated System of Management (OGAS), and its principal promoter, Viktor M. Glushkov. Peters describes the rise and fall of OGAS—its theoretical and practical reach, its vision of a national economy managed by network, the bureaucratic obstacles it encountered, and the institutional stalemate that killed it. Finally, he considers the implications of the Soviet experience for today's networked world.

A clear-eyed examination of the open access movement: past history, current conflicts, and future possibilities. Open access (OA) could one day put the sum of human knowledge at our fingertips. But the goal of allowing everyone to read everything faces fierce resistance. In Athena Unbound, Peter Baldwin offers an up-to-date look at the ideals and history behind OA, and unpacks the controversies that arise when the dream of limitless information slams into entrenched interests in favor of the status quo. In addition to providing a clear analysis of the debates, Baldwin focuses on thorny issues such as copyright and ways to pay for “free” knowledge. He also provides a roadmap that would make OA economically viable and, as a result, advance one of humanity’s age-old ambitions. Baldwin addresses the arguments in terms of disseminating scientific research, the history of intellectual property and copyright, and the development of the university and research establishment. As he notes, the hard sciences have already created a funding model that increasingly provides open access, but at the cost of crowding out the humanities. Baldwin proposes a new system that would shift costs from consumers to producers and free scholarly knowledge from the paywalls and institutional barriers that keep it from much of the world. Rich in detail and free of jargon, Athena Unbound is an essential primer on the state of the global open access movement.

The theory of knowledge, or epistemology, is often regarded as a dry topic that bears little relation to actual knowledge practices. Knowledge: The Philosophical Quest in History addresses this perception by showing the roots, developments and prospects of modern epistemology from its beginnings in the nineteenth century to the present day. Beginning with an introduction to the central questions and problems in theory of knowledge, Steve Fuller goes on to demonstrate that contemporary epistemology is enriched by its interdisciplinarity, analysing keys areas including: Epistemology as Cognitive Economics Epistemology as Divine Psychology Epistemology as Philosophy of Science Epistemology as Sociology of Science Epistemology and Postmodernism. A wide-ranging and historically-informed assessment of the ways in which man has - and continues to - pursue, question, contest, expand and shape knowledge, this book is essential reading anyone in the Humanities and Social Sciences interested in the history and practical application of epistemology.