Information and Power in History

Nijenhuis, I.J.A.; Faassen, Marijke van; Sluijter, Ronald; Gijsenbergh, J.; Jong, W. de

doi:10.4324/9780429438738

Cited by 3 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…2.2 Information history and documentation studies Within the ambit of Library and Information Science (LIS), scholars of information history and documentation practices have discussed the intricate relations between power and information/documentation practices (Black, 2006;Blair et al, 2021;Black and Schiller, 2014;Ketelaar, 2021;Nijenhuis et al, 2020;Weller, 2010). One line of research has looked at the emergence of state and state-sanctioned practices of collecting and manipulating information about citizens for purposes of economic management and social control, for instance in the England of the last 500 years (Bilansky, 2018;Higgs, 2004;Weller and Bawden, 2005).…”

Section: Documents As Weaponsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Documents as weapons: secret police files in Communist and post-Communist Romania

Vamanu

2022

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PurposeThis study examined dossiers of informative pursual (DIPs), a particular type of secret police files, before and after the fall of Communism in Romania. These DIPs were often weaponized against citizens perceived to be anti-government.Design/methodology/approachBased on Buckland's (2017) concept of a document as an object with physical, mental and social parts, the study used thematic analysis to examine volumes of DIPs from 1945 to 1989 Communist Romania as well as several recorded reactions to the DIPs by the victims who were targeted by the Communist secret police.FindingsFour themes were revealed by the study's findings and discussed within the manuscript: DIPs as unreliable epistemic tools, DIPs as tools to construct the identity of the “People's Enemy,” DIPs as weapons to fight the “People's Enemy” and DIPs as tools that could be used in counterattacks during post-Communism, including in political-economic blackmailing.Research limitations/implicationsThere are two major limitations to research of DIPs. First, since many DIPs have been stolen, copied illicitly or even destroyed, it is difficult to articulate precisely their actual or potential social and political effects. Researchers may often detect these effects only indirectly, based on information leaks in the news. Second, many victims of surveillance practices during the Communist period have chosen not to leave records of their reactions to reading the DIPs that targeted them.Social implicationsCurrent and future comprehensive studies of DIPs can reveal possible parallels between surveillance by the Communist regime and the massive data-collection that occurs in democratic societies, particularly given the increased technical capabilities for processing data in these democratic societies.Originality/valueWithin documentation studies, secret police files and document weaponization have been particularly under-researched, therefore this study contributes to a small body of literature.

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Section: Documents As Weaponsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Within the ambit of Library and Information Science (LIS), scholars of information history and documentation practices have discussed the intricate relations between power and information/documentation practices (Black, 2006; Blair et al. , 2021; Black and Schiller, 2014; Ketelaar, 2021; Nijenhuis et al. , 2020; Weller, 2010).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Documents as weapons: secret police files in Communist and post-Communist Romania

Vamanu

2022

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“…This book review is written from the perspective of information history. Recently, there has been a rise in books that address the history of information from various positions (Blair et al, 2021; Dover, 2021; Koopman, 2019; Nijenhuis et al, 2020). A common feature for these publications is their largely Western viewpoint, which is exactly what this present volume seeks to expand and challenge.…”

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confidence: 99%

Literary information in China: A history. By Jack W.Chen, AnatolyDetwyler, XiaoLui, Christopher M. B.Nugent, BruceRusk (Eds.), New York: Columbia University Press. 2021. pp. 672. $90.00 (hbk). ISBN: 9780231195522

Skouvig

2023

Asso for Info Science & Tech

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Vested Authorities, Emergent Brokers and User Archivists: Power and Legitimacy in Information Provision

Hoekstra

Koolen

Faassen

2022

J. Comput. Cult. Herit.

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The past decades have changed the way we deal with archives and archival materials. Archives digitised their inventories and part of their collections, but they were joined by many other parties who published archival collections and archive-worthy materials on the web. The information world is in continuous flux, and the developments have made clear that archives and libraries have lost much of their position as the vested authorities of information access. They are challenged by technological parties and citizen science that have as yet not established themselves in definitive positions as information brokers. We propose to analyse the field in terms of information authority, a composite of many different aspects that all contribute to its importance, availability and use. In this article, we first explore the issue of (information) authority in the digital realm, and explain why we choose a conflict metaphor to analyse the different types of partners in the information ecosystem. Digital archives call for cooperation and openness as information is ‘everywhere’, but this is hard to realise as it requires translating intentions into technical means. To maintain their position of authority, archives adopt standards and regulations. We argue that openness is the key, but hard to organise with the existing standards because they are used in monolithic ways that make it hard to combine information. Combining asks for methods from established scholarly and archival disciplines as well as from technology. Furthermore, sharing and cooperation require a harmonisation of contexts: the different contexts in which information is created and organised need to be aligned to understand how collections can be combined across different dimensions. This calls for providing (structured) metadata that define the scope of a collection, to allow one to determine whether combining information is useful. At the moment, the state of affairs is in flux and there is no fixed methodology. In the last part, we explore ways to facilitate and evaluate interdisciplinary communication and collaboration on methodology to address the preceding challenges of producing quality, in all realms.

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Information and Power in History

Cited by 3 publications

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Documents as weapons: secret police files in Communist and post-Communist Romania

Documents as weapons: secret police files in Communist and post-Communist Romania

Literary information in China: A history. By Jack W.Chen, AnatolyDetwyler, XiaoLui, Christopher M. B.Nugent, BruceRusk (Eds.), New York: Columbia University Press. 2021. pp. 672. $90.00 (hbk). ISBN: 9780231195522

Vested Authorities, Emergent Brokers and User Archivists: Power and Legitimacy in Information Provision

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