INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY, INFORMATION AND HISTORY

Abstract

One of the truisms of our decade is, that we live in the information age. Indeed information technology influences all disciplines in academia and its nature is central to the discussion of at least a dozen disciplines, from Floridi's philosophy of information to computer science and from quantum physics to library science. That such a large number of fields of research emphasize different concepts is not really surprising; it would be, if they would not. Nevertheless, all of them are supported by one integrated type of information technology, so the underlying concept must be consistent. In the field of history we can show, however, that the classical derivation of practical information technology, derived from Shannon's implicit creation of an equivalence between communication and information, vulnerates the way information is handled in the field. We will discuss how this creates severe limits to the practical application of current information technology and which changes would be needed to support history's problem domain. This is particularly important as experience shows that theoretical discussions of the nature of information, general or within specific knowledge domains, have almost no influence on the development of the actual information technology, unless the theoretical discussions reflect implementation policies.