Why read The Specter of the Archive?

Book cover of The Specter of the Archive: Political Practice and the Information State in Early Modern Britain

Book description

An exploration of the proliferation of paper in early modern Britain and its far-reaching effects on politics and society.

We are used to thinking of ourselves as living in a time when more information is more available than ever before. In The Specter of the Archive, Nicholas Popper shows that…

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Management

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European history

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Specter of the Archive as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Asheesh Siddique

Author

Today, archives are places where we go to research and learn about the past. But as Popper’s fascinating book shows, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, governments used archives like we use computers and databases today as facilities for storing information they considered immediately relevant to solving political problems.

Just like we use computers today, governments mobilized archives to collect, organize, and redeploy information to advance their specific policy objectives. While the early modern world might seem quite distant from our own, Popper shows us that the problem of using information to exert political power is a very old…

From Asheesh's list on understand the history of data.