Member-only story
Known: A (Very) Brief History of Information
From ledger books to large language models
“We have so much data but we still don’t know why the students are dropping out”. It seems like a sensible thing for one of my colleagues to say. I’ve been sat in a Departmental meeting for over an hour at this point and I can feel the energy levels of my thirty colleagues on Microsoft Teams start to wane. I have two other windows open on my computer: a spreadsheet showing all manner of data about student performance and a photograph of a page from a church record book written in 1638. Both are peaking out at me, either side of the Teams window. The meeting comes to its conclusion of awkward waving and muted sign offs in the chat and I spend the next week puzzling over both the spreadsheet and the record book: ways to capture and use information.
Like a good proportion of the British population, I might be considered a knowledge worker. My partner, a lawyer, is also considered a knowledge worker. We live in the UK, part of an Anglophone culture that includes sayings like “knowledge is power”, where a census asks for data about us each decade (and has done since 1841) and where our local library is open three days each week. Each…
