Join the Department of History and William Aspray, University of Minnesota Twin Cities, for a talk on “What is the History of Information? A Case Study of the United States in 1920."

Free and open to the public.

While scholars have written about the history of books and the history of libraries for 100 years and history of computing for 50 years, it has only been in the current century that scholars have regarded their work as part of a history of information. There is still considerable disagreement about the scope and character of this field. This lecture will go beyond the abstract discussions of definition to examine a case study about what might be featured in a history of information of the United States in 1920 and how it might differ from a traditional historical account of this topic. 

William Aspray is Senior Research Fellow at the Charles Babbage Institute. In his early career he taught at Williams and Harvard. In his mid-career, he held senior administrative posts at the Charles Babbage Institute, the IEEE History Center, and Computing Research Association. For the final two decades before retiring, he held senior faculty positions in the information schools at Indiana, Texas, and Colorado. He has published books on the history and philosophy of mathematics; the history and historiography of computing and information; and misinformation, accountability, information-seeking, and other topics related to the social study of information.