Information Society, Domains, and Culture

Although there is much impressive scholarship by computer historians, there is little that is broad enough to cover more than a single company or a single country, and many historical studies are much narrower than this. In this article, William Aspray briefly describes a useful conceptual tool for thinking historically about information: the information domain, which is an academic field of study that gives prominence in one way or another to some notion of information. The main point of this discussion of information domains is to suggest that the historians of computing should become more familiar with the literature on the history of libraries, archives, museums, conservation, and information science and see how they can learn from and integrate this knowledge into their own work.