Information & Culture is an academic journal printed three times a year by the University of Texas Press. It publishes original, high-quality, peer reviewed articles examining the social and cultural influences and impact of information and its associated technologies, broadly construed, on all areas of human endeavor. In keeping with the spirit of information studies, we seek papers emphasizing a human-centered focus that address the role of and reciprocal relationship of information and culture, regardless of time and place.

The journal welcomes submissions from an array of relevant theoretical and methodological approaches, including but not limited to historical, sociological, psychological, political and educational research that address the interaction of information and culture.

To learn more about our submission standards or submit an article for publication in Information & Culture, visit our submission requirements page.

 

New Issue: Volume 55 Number 1 (February 2020)

A History of Women in British Telecommunications: Introducing a Special Issue  

by Elizabeth Bruton, Mar Hicks

p. 1-9

Elizabeth Bruton is curator of technology and engineering at the Science Museum in London. Her research interests include the history of communications, gender and women in electrical engineering, museum collections, and scientific instruments.

Mar Hicks is associate professor of history of technology at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. Their work focuses on the history of computing, gender, labor, and sexuality. Hicks's first book, Programmed Inequality (MIT Press, 2017), shows how sexism negatively affected British computing.

Embodying Telegraphy in Late Victorian London  

by Katie Hindmarch-Watson

p. 10-29

Katie Hindmarch-Watson is assistant professor of modern British history at Johns Hopkins University. Her forthcoming book, Dispatches from the Underground: Telecommunications Workers and the Making of an Information Capital, 1870–1916 (University of California Press), explores both the work experiences and symbolic import of London's telegraphists, telegraph boys, and telephone operators in the first decades of nationalized British telecommunications.

"Maiden, Whom We Never See": Cultural Representations of the "Lady Telephonist" in Britain ca. 1880–1930 and Institutional Responses  

by Helen Glew

p. 30-50

Helen Glew is senior lecturer in history at the University of Westminster. Her research focuses on women's employment in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Britain, and she is the author of Gender, Rhetoric and Regulation: Women's Work in the Civil Service and the London County Council, 1900–55 (Manchester University Press, 2016).

"Uncertain at Present for Women, but May Increase": Opportunities for Women in Wireless Telegraphy during the First World War  

by Elizabeth Bruton

p. 51-74

Elizabeth Bruton is curator of technology and engineering at the Science Museum in London. Her research interests include the history of communications, gender and women in electrical engineering, museum collections, and scientific instruments.

The Key Role Played by WAAC British Post Office Female Staff in Army Signal Units on the Western Front, 1917–1920  

by Barbara Walsh

p. 75-97

Barbara Walsh holds a PhD in history from Lancaster University UK and is an independent scholar who has produced several groundbreaking works on a variety of topics that have opened new fields of research for overseas scholars. She is published by the Irish Academic Press, the History Press, and Pen and Sword and in translation by Les Éditions des l'Officine.

Available book reviews for the upcoming issue (Summer 2020)

Numbered Lives: Life and Death in Quantum Media, by Jacqueline Wernimont, by Jacqueline Wernimont
Reviewed by John Henry Adams
"A feminist media history of quantification, uncovering the stories behind the tools and technologies we use to count, measure, and weigh our lives and realities." (MIT Press)

The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture: Volume Five: US Popular Print Culture to 1860, edited by Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray
Reviewed by Tracy Bonfitto
"Forty-one contributors from across disciplines consider either literary practices of diverse groups or specific genres of popular print passing through people's hands, which included advertisements, almanacs, captivity narratives, ephemera, lithographs, magazines, newspapers, nonfiction, novels, pamphlets, poetry, and slave narratives." (Oxford University Press)

The Joy of Search: A Google Insider’s Guide to Going Beyond the Basics, by Daniel M. Russell
Reviewed by Cai Fan Du
"In The Joy of Search, Daniel Russell shows us how to be great online researchers. We don't have to be computer geeks or a scholar searching out obscure facts; we just need to know some basic methods." (MIT Press)

Digital Cash: The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Utopians, and Technologists Who Created Cryptocurrency, by Finn Brunton
Reviewed by Gili Vidan
"The fascinating untold story of digital cash and its creators—from experiments in the 1970s to the mania over Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies." (Princeton University Press)

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