Between steam and cybernetics lies a missing phase in the history of information culture. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, national governments and writers of fiction alike began to take an interest in information not simply as fact, nor yet as effortlessly transmissible data, but as an unusual and destabilizing new phenomenon. Modernist Informatics mines this burgeoning bureaucracy and marshals an array of archival evidence to detail the varied reactions of writers struggling in their lives and works to make sense of this strange new age of information. As James Purdon...
Between steam and cybernetics lies a missing phase in the history of information culture. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, national governmen...