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Cats, Carpenters, and Accountants: Bibliographical Foundations of Information Science

By Wayne de Fremery

An expansive case for bibliography as infrastructure in information science. argues that bibliography serves a foundational role within information science as infrastructure, and like all infrastructures, it needs and deserves attention. Wayne de Fremery’s thoughtful provocation positions bibliography as a means to serve the many ends pursued by information scientists. He explains that bibliographic practices, such as enumeration and description, lie at the heart of knowledge practices and cultural endeavors, but these kinds of infrastructures are difficult to see. In this book, he reveals them and the ways that they formulate information and meaning, artificial intelligence, and human knowledge.

“Prototyping a Comparative Global Humanities”: History of Humanities publishes a special issue on Shared Pasts for Shared Futures (co-edited by Denecke, Forte, Brown) based on our inaugural conference!

History of Humanities, Volume 9, Number 1, Spring 2024

THEME: SHARED PASTS FOR SHARED FUTURES; PROTOTYPING A COMPARATIVE GLOBAL HUMANITIES 

This volume argues for a comparative and global reimagination of the humanities in their intellectual, disciplinary, and larger institutional forms. We seek to expand the geographical scope and temporal depth of inquiry while challenging Eurocentric biases through the promotion of neglected traditions and their conceptual vocabularies. Crucial to the success of our “comparative global humanities” is scholarship that fully embraces the complexities and diversities of human pasts.

Read the introduction by the co-editors Wiebke Denecke, Alexander Forte, and Tristan Brown HERE.

From the introduction: From Crisis to New Adjectives

We cannot not hear that the humanities are in crisis. Retrenched. Out-STEMed. Demoralized. But we are also hearing: the humanities are resurrecting. Blossoming in unexpected corners. Becoming seriously public. Critical to this critical moment. Until a decade ago, for decades, the outcry was: Crisis!

Now we have the luxury to ask, Which humanities? Adjectives abound. Public, applied, old, new, medical, environmental, digital, positive, planetary, global, even “blue” (maritime)!1 This proliferation of qualifiers signals vitality, but also a frantic quest for new semantic framings of an old European protean noun.