What is it about?
How do we acquire knowledge? Who decides? This chapter discusses how historical knowledge is created and disseminated and how those decisions are made within the context of the 1602 Chinese-language world map conceived by Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci.
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Why is it important?
We live in an era of fake news and artificial intelligence. Understanding where our information comes from and how it got there are more important than ever. The same can be true for our historical knowledge. It, too, has been subject to a chain of decisions, from its creation to how it ended up in a form available to researchers, who then used it in their work. Understanding the complexities of this process can help us to understand better the "truth" and validity of historical information.
Perspectives
As a curator of rare books, I am deeply aware of the role I play in knowledge dissemination. The decisions I make to purchase or not purchase books and other documents affect the availability to research of the knowledge they contain. If a book or document ends up in a private collection, it may not be available to be studied for generations. But what if it contains the key to our understanding of an historical event or person and a librarian or curator like myself doesn't have the funds to acquire it for our collection? Of if we are able to add it to our collection, what if there are no funds or people available to catalog it and make it known? I hope readers think about the impact of this and how it shapes history.
Marguerite Ragnow
University of Minnesota Twin Cities
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Writing Technologies and Special Collections: Agents and Arbiters of Change through the Transmission of Knowledge, January 2024, Brill,
DOI: 10.1163/9789004684782_013.
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