Includes bibliographical references and index.

Part one. Premodern regimes and practices -- Realms of information in the medieval Islamic world -- Information in early modern East Asia -- Information in early modern Europe -- Networks and the making of a connected world in the sixteenth century -- Records, secretaries, and the European information state, circa 1400-1700 -- Periodicals and the commercialization of information in the early modern era -- Documents, empire, and capitalism in the nineteenth century -- Nineteenth-century media technologies -- Networking : information circles the modern world -- Publicity, propaganda, and public opinion : from the Titanic to disaster to the Hungarian uprising -- Communication, computation, and information -- Search -- Part two. Alphabetical entries.

"Information technology shapes nearly every part of modern life, and debates about information--its meaning, effects, and applications--are central to a range of fields, from economics, technology, and politics to library science, media studies, and cultural studies. This rich, unique resource traces the history of information with an approach designed to draw connections across fields and perspectives, and provide essential context for our current age of information. Clear, accessible, and authoritative, the book opens with a series of articles that provide a narrative history of information from premodern practices to twenty-first-century information culture. This section focuses on major developments in the creation, storage, search, exchange, management, and manipulation of information, as well as the many meanings and uses of information over time. Coverage spans Europe, North America, and many other places and periods, including the medieval Islamic world and early modern East Asia, as well as the emergence of global networks. A second, alphabetical section includes more than 100 concise articles that cover specific concepts (e.g., data, intellectual property, privacy); formats and genres (books, databases, maps, newspapers, scrolls, social media); people (archivists, diplomats and spies, readers, secretaries, teachers); practices (censorship, forecasting, learning, surveilling, translating); processes (digitization, quantification, storage and search); systems (bureaucracy, platforms, telecommunications); technologies (algorithms, cameras, computers), and much more. The book concludes with an informative glossary, defining terms from "analog/digital" to "World Wide Web.""--