New in Paperback

The Modern Invention of Information

Discourse, History, and Power

Ronald E. Day

 

Available March 2008

Paper, 0-8093-2847-X
978-0-8093-2847-5, $30.00s
256 pages, 6 x 9
Rhetoric

 

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Analyzing the concept and politics of information

In The Modern Invention of Information: Discourse, History, and Power, Ronald E. Day provides a historically informed critical analysis of the concept and politics of information. Analyzing texts in Europe and the United States, his critical reading method goes beyond traditional historiographical readings of communication and information by engaging specific historical texts in terms of their attempts to construct and reshape history.

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“This book should be required reading for all library and information science students and practitioners . . . Day packs together a whole series of arguments that raise fundamental questions about the purpose and practice of information studies today.”
—Libraries and Culture

 “[A] beautifully thought-through attempt to develop a historiography of information. [Day] draws together a number of threads . . . to make the argument that ‘information,’ so frequently portrayed as a purely abstract commodity, is materially textured and temporally rich.”—Geoffrey C. Bowker, author of Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences

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Ronald E. Day is an associate professor of library and information science at Indiana University, Bloomington.  He is co-editor of Rethinking Knowledge Management: From Knowledge Objects to Knowledge Processes.