"Information Overload" in Early Modern Europe

Catalog description

Our current information overload is not the first time we’ve agonized over too much information and utilized different ways to cope. This course examines information overload in Early Modern Europe (1500-1800) and its connection to early modern data science. We will engage with the forms of information overload: knowledge access and use, community and social bonds, commodification, and even as a non-issue. Using a varied assortment of primary sources—from copyright laws to herbariums to account books—along with developing techniques to read academic articles and books, this class will help you begin to analyze the past with the tools of a historian. You will find that modern familiarity of “information overload” provides an entry way into thinking about the authority placed—and constructed—on information both in the early modern period and now.