The continuity I have in mind has to do with the nature of information itself or, to put it differently, the inherent instability of texts. In place of the long-term view of technological transformations, which underlies the common notion that we have just entered a new era, the information age, I want to argue that every age was an age of information, each in its own way, and that information has always been unstable. Let's begin with the Internet and work backward in time.

The Library in the New Age by Robert Darnton, historian and Director of the Harvard Library. A wide-ranging overview of the status of libraries in the modern world, touching on such subjects as: journalist poker games, French people liking the smell of books, bibliography at Google, news dissemination in the 18th Century, book piracy and the different texts of Shakespeare. Some responses: Defending the Library of Google, The Future in the Past and Librarians Need a Better Apologetic.
posted by Kattullus on Jun 1, 2008 - 22 comments

A virtual copy of Historiae Animalium, the first pictorial catalogue of the animal world (lots of pretty pictures, but the text is all in latin). It was compiled in the 16th century by the Swiss naturalist Conrad Gessner, who is considered the father of zoology (and, incidentally, also the father of bibliography [Word Document]).
posted by Kattullus on Mar 6, 2007 - 29 comments