Bücher von William Aspray

This is not a book about the history of computing or the history of information. Instead, it is a meta-historical book about the research and writing of these types of history.

Microhistory is a technique that has been used effectively by writers of both fiction and nonfiction. It enables the author to cut through the complexities of large swaths of history by focusing on a particular time and place. Microhistories are particularly useful in historical study when a subfield has recently arisen and there are not yet enough monographic studies from which to draw general patterns. This microhistory focuses on a single year (1920) across the United States, with the goal of understanding the various roles of information in this society. It gives greater emphasis to the informational aspects of traditional historical topics such as farming, government bureaucracy, the Spanish flu pandemic, and Prohibition; and it gives greater attention to information-rich topics such as libraries and museums, schools and colleges, the financial services and office machinery industries, scientific research institutions, and management consultancies.

This book identifies ways in which the conceptual approaches to heritage tourism studies can be applied by information scholars to gain new insights into the study of misinformation.

Formal approaches are those taken by government bodies through laws, court decisions and actions of government regulatory bodies.

One major theme running through the book is business opportunities and failures, as well as the harms to consumers and traditional brick-and-mortar companies that occurred as entrepreneurs tried to take advantage of the Internet to create online companies related to food.