ABSTRACT
When Claude E. Shannon published “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” in 1948, he could not foresee what enormous impact his findings would have on a wide variety of fields, including engineering, physics, genetics, cryptology, computer science, statistics, economics, psychology, linguistics, philosophy, and aesthetics. 1 Indeed, when he learned of the scope of that impact, he was somewhat less than enthusiastic, warning his readers in “The Bandwagon” that, while “many of the concepts of information theory will prove useful in these other fields, [. . .] the establishing of such applications is not a trivial matter of translating words to a new domain, but rather the slow tedious process of hypothesis and experimental verification.” 2 For the author of this essay as well as fellow contributors from the humanities and social sciences, Shannon’s caveat has special pertinence. This is so because we get our understanding of information theory less from the highly technical “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” than from Warren Weaver’s “Recent Contributions to the Mathematical Theory of Communication” (1949), the now canonical popularization of Shannonian information theory, which was published alongside Shannon’s original essay (now renamed “The Mathematical Theory of Communication”) in The Mathematical Theory of Communication (1949). 3
