Historically Speaking

Burke includes an exhaustive amount of evidence to support his many claims of how knowledge is used or not--in fact, some cited this approach as being overwhelming and detracting from the book’s clarity. I found his style of presentation to be easy enough to follow and his grouping of historic examples admirably   far-ranging, but the book has been called ‘nebulous’ for its lack of a central theme (Davies). Burke splits his subject matter into three sections: the acquisition and use of knowledge, loss of knowledge, and geographies, sociologies and histories of knowledge developments. Each section is split into nine subsections total that describe a more specific trend; for instance, ‘Experts and Expertise’ within the section on knowledge loss. This format does not encourage interconnection, and makes the book feel simultaneously regimented and free-floating (since no one subsection ties into another).

In the absence of a unifying theme, I used my own analysis to structure this project. People have handled knowledge in much the same ways throughout history, regardless of the technologies they used.