(Replies to Dr Eve Rosenhaft, [log in to unmask]  please)

"Information and Social Knowledge: From Gossip to the Internet"

14th Annual Workshop of the Economic History Society
Women's Committee Institute of Historical Research, London,
 7–8 November 2003

This workshop brings together social and economic historians,
historians of science and technology and social scientists to
explore the various applications of the concept of
information in historical studies and discuss the ways in
which attention to people's access to knowledge and the
systems (formal and informal, human and mechanical) for
its transmission can help us to understand social order
and economic action.  We are reminded daily that we are
experiencing an 'information revolution', that since the
second half of the 20th century we have been living in
an 'information society' and that in the 21st our children
will have to find their place in a 'knowledge society'.
Accounts of this purported epochal shift in the social
functions of information focus on the dialectic between
a growing demand for specific knowledges and the
development of uniquely powerful and dynamic
technologies for generating, storing and communicating
data. The social and imaginative impacts of digital and
computer technologies have been described in terms of
actual transformations in the labour process and the
conditions of economic life, and a potential for radically
new kinds of relationships among individuals, between
individuals and society, and between human and machine.

Historians have begun to test this model.  They have
questioned the uniqueness of our own experience in the
light of evidence for earlier 'information revolutions'.  At
the same time the understanding of information and
knowledge as commodities, tools or social goods
whose transmission is central to social production and
reproduction, and the associated concepts of information
networks, systems and regimes, have been adopted in
historical studies whose objects range from material
culture to imperial governance.  The underlying questions
of who gets to know what, and how, and how this affects
the way life is lived, remain pressing ones for both
economic theory and historical explanation.

The gender politics of information and knowledge
constitutea common theme of the workshop.  Topics
include early-modern credit networks, nineteenth-century
wealth transmission, women in the academic knowledge
community, finding one's way in the  modern city, rumour
and survival in World War II, information technologies and
political participation in the 19th and 20th centuries, the
social making of digital computing, the internet as a
source of lay medical knowledge.

Speakers include:
Alison Adam/Helen Richardson (Salford),
Jon Agar (Manchester/London),
David Green (London),
Flis Henwood/Sally Wyatt/Angie Hart (Brighton),
Claire Jones (Liverpool),
Sandra Mols (Manchester),
Adelheid von Saldern (Hannover),
Judith Spicksley (Hull),
Penny Summerfield (Manchester)

The workshop will begin with a roundtable discussion on the
evening of 7 November, and conclude at 4.15 p.m. on 8 November.

For further information (registration etc.), contact:

Dr Eve Rosenhaft
School of Modern Languages
University of Liverpool
Liverpool L69 7ZR
E-mail [log in to unmask]

Dr Graeme Gooday,
Senior Lecturer
Chair of the Division of History & Philosophy of Science
School of Philosophy
University of Leeds
LEEDS LS2 9JT
U.K.

E-mail: [log in to unmask]
Tel:  (0)113 343 3274
Fax:  (0)113 343 3265
http://www.philosophy.leeds.ac.uk/Staff/Staff1stpage.htm