History of Information Theory

Cornell University, Ithaca NY

Investigators

Abstract

SES 00-0080689 - Ronald R. Kline (Cornell University) - "History of Information Theory" As one of the cluster of innovations in computing, microelectronics, communications, and control announced to the general public in the late 1940s, information theory forms part of the foundation for inventions in information technology which social commentators now herald as the primary cause of a so-called Information Revolution. Although scholars have challenged the technological determinism of such claims by investigating the social construction and use of communication systems, computers, and computer science, a scholarly book-length history of information theory does not exist. This award supports a PI as he investigates the intellectual, social, and cultural history of the creation of information theory in the United States and Britain by Norbert Wiener, Claude Shannon, Dennis Gabor, Donald MacKay, and others, the widespread interest in applying the theory to biology and the social sciences in the 1950s, its application to communications engineering and information processing in the 1960s and 1970s, and its links to discourses in economics and sociology about an information economy and an information society from the 1970s to the present. The PI is particularly interested in the interrelated themes of boundary-work, the relationship between science and technology, and the role of users of scientific and engineering knowledge as agents of scientific and technological change. He is exploring the concept of boundary-work in regard to competition among scientific and engineering disciplines, such as communications engineering, mathematics, physics, economics, and sociology (instead of the division between science and non-science). In doing so, he is investigating boundary-work as a closure mechanism in scientific and engineering disputes, studying how contemporaries perceived the relationship between science and technology (instead of asking what the relationship was), and extending recent work on users in science and technology studies from everyday consumers to the realm of scientists and engineers. The PI's larger goal is to write a scholarly book about the development of the information theory in the United States (as the result of a series of negotiations among scientists, engineers, and mathematicians) and the connections between these actions and the later discourses on an Information Society. His immediate goal, however, is (with the support of this award) to finish the archival and journal research on this project and conduct interviews with key figures in information theory for the proposed book.