Knowledge, Reading and Culture

Knowledge, Reading and Culture: Studies in Information Practice is an interdisciplinary inquiry focusing on four decades of work by the South African information scientist, Emeritus Professor Archie Dick. The edited volume brings together library, information and history specialists to engage with a number of Professor Dicks areas of research focus: the culture and philosophy of information (especially with regard to questions of epistemology); information freedom (how censorship and media concentration affects political agency); reading and publishing cultures (especially in colonial and postcolonial contexts) and focuses on how these affect information education for diverse, multicultural and cosmopolitan communities. How our understanding of true belief is justified at the level of classification, indexation, curation and publishing have become significant issues in the transition to digital environments. This work seeks to harness a range of insights relating to the modes of knowledge representation in information spaces and to uncover how these impact globally significant repertoires of agency, with a special focus on how the mediation of reading and access to public knowledge is both a site of resistance and appropriation.

Matthew Kelly, Library Management Australia, Sydney, Australia.