Daniel Rosenberg - Early Modern Information Overload - Journal of the History of Ideas ... - 1 views
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During the early modern period, and especially during the years 1550-1750, Europe experienced a kind of "information explosion." I emphasize the word "experience" as this is an essential element to the arguments presented here. There is ample evidence to demonstrate that during this period, the production, circulation, and dissemination of scientific and scholarly texts accelerated tremendously. In her essay, Ann Blair notes that over the course of this period, a typical scholarly library might have grown by a factor of fifty, while Brian Ogilvie demonstrates an equivalent acceleration in the production and consumption of texts in the domain of natural history; and there is a large literature to back both of these arguments up. But the fact of accelerated textual production and consumption is not what is principally at issue here. What is essential is the sense that such a phenomenon was taking place and the variety of responses to it.
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Nils Peterson on 17 Mar 10info overload 1550-1750 -- rom printed books
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She examines the varieties of textual practices "deployed by early modern scholars" in response to a perceived "overabundance of books" during the period between 1550 and 1700, and she argues that historians have paid disproportionate attention to what she calls "literary reading" and not enough to other modes of encountering and engaging textual materials ranging from browsing and skimming to buying and collecting to annotating, cutting and pasting, and dog-earing. For Blair these other modes of acting upon texts are important in all historical moments, but in situations where readers feel themselves overwhelmed by information, they become all that much more crucial and telling.
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"By the 1580s," Ogilvie writes, "the botanical tyro had to master a tremendous number of words, things, and authorities." And during this period botanical literature increasingly sought to address precisely this concern. Already in the 1550s, with the work of Conrad Gesner and Remert Dodoens, Ogilvie observes a shift from an older form of botanical treatise, descended from the alphabetical materia medica, to a new form organized around "tacit notions of similarity" among different natural types. Not that all of these developments were useful. As Ogilvie notes, the move toward similarity was not a direct move toward scientific taxonomy, and in different works vastly different categorical schemes applied, so that the same plant might be grouped with "shrubs" in one and, in another, with "plants whose flowers please." Eventually, with Caspar Bauhin at the end of the sixteenth century and John Ray at the end of the seventeenth, Ogilvie notes the rise of a new class of scientific literature aimed not only at describing and organizing natural facts but at doing the same work for scientific texts themselves.
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organization strategies. see the TED talk Theron bookmarked recently, new tools to navigate the web by grouping similarly tagged pages
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