Description:
The history of data brings together topics and themes from a variety of perspectives in history of science: histories of the material culture of information and of computing, the history of politics on individual and global scales, gender and women's history, as well as the histories of many individual disciplines, to name just a few of the areas covered by essays in this volume. But the history of data is more than just the sum of its parts. It provides an emerging new rubric for considering the impact of changes in cultures of information in the sciences in the longue durée, and an opportunity for historians to rethink important questions that cross many of our traditional disciplinary categories.
Brief description: David Sepkoski is the Thomas M. Siebel Chair in the History of Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of several books, most recently Rereading the Fossil Record: The Growth of Paleobiology as an Evolutionary Discipline, also published by the University of Chicago Press.