ABSTRACT
Information has emerged, as J. Black argues, as ‘a major theme in cultural, intellectual, political, social and economic history’. In the same similar vein, S. Franklin has noted the recent ‘foregrounding or upgrading of claims for the importance of information as a key to understanding major cultural phenomena and historical processes’. Arguably, information history is more familiar, and thus less troubling conceptually, to those who are associated with the information sciences, the subfields of which have produced bodies – and in some cases extensive bodies – of historical literature. The wide array of periods and topics presented at the conference demonstrate that no period of history is information-poor and that no historical subject can be considered information-free. Yet despite having found some traction in the humanities and the history-inflected social sciences, the concept of information history is yet to ‘stick’.
