Today's Facts - by James W Cortada (Hardcover)

About the Book

This book summarizes how information changed since the early 1800s, what it looks like today, including how it is being influenced by such current circumstances as the role of Big Data, artificial intelligence, misinformation on the Internet, and the automation of decision-making by computers using digital and analog information.

Book Synopsis

This is the third and final volume in a broad study about the role of information largely in the Unites States since the early nineteenth century. This book summarizes how information changed since the early 1800s, what it looks like today, including how it is being influenced by such current circumstances as the role of Big Data, artificial intelligence, misinformation on the Internet, and the automation of decision-making by computers using digital and analog information. It is designed to be read by scholars in multiple disciplines and by the general public. It is the byproduct of 30 years of studying the modern role of information. The book includes a broad curated bibliographic essay about the broad subject of modern information.

About the Author

James W. Cortada is a Senior Research Fellow at the Charles Babbage Institute at the University of Minnesota-Minneapolis. He holds a Ph.D. in modern history and spent nearly 4 decades working at IBM in various sales, managerial, and research positions. He has spent nearly a half-century at the center of much that went on in the world's engagement with computers and has written on its contemporary uses in business publications, history of computing, and on the history of information for over four decades. He has published over a dozen books on the role of information in modern society, including Fake News Nation: The Long History of Lies and Misinterpretations in America (R&L 2019), Building Blocks of Society: History, Information Ecosystems, and Infrastructures (R&L 2021) and Birth of Modern Facts: How the Information Revolution Transformed Academic Research, Governments, and Businesses (R&L 2023).