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 (Spring 2020)

Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media, by Sarah T. Roberts, by Seth Perlow
Reviewed by Natalia Kovalyova
"An eye-opening look at the invisible workers who protect us from seeing humanity’s worst on today’s commercial internet. Sarah T. Roberts, an award-winning social media scholar, offers the first extensive ethnographic study of the commercial content moderation industry. Based on interviews with workers from Silicon Valley to the Philippines, at boutique firms and at major social media companies, she contextualizes this hidden industry and examines the emotional toll it takes on its workers. This revealing investigation of the people “behind the screen” offers insights into not only the reality of our commercial internet but the future of globalized labor in the digital age." (Yale University Press)

Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots and the Politics of Technological Futures, by Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora
Reviewed by Andrea Flores
"In Surrogate Humanity Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora trace the ways in which robots, artificial intelligence, and other technologies serve as surrogates for human workers within a labor system entrenched in racial capitalism and patriarchy. Analyzing myriad technologies, from sex robots and military drones to sharing-economy platforms, Atanasoski and Vora show how liberal structures of antiblackness, settler colonialism, and patriarchy are fundamental to human---machine interactions, as well as the very definition of the human. While these new technologies and engineering projects promise a revolutionary new future, they replicate and reinforce racialized and gendered ideas about devalued work, exploitation, dispossession, and capitalist accumulation. Yet, even as engineers design robots to be more perfect versions of the human—more rational killers, more efficient workers, and tireless companions—the potential exists to develop alternative modes of engineering and technological development in ways that refuse the racial and colonial logics that maintain social hierarchies and inequality." (Duke University Press)

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