Books

In 2026, Matthew Kelly (Editor, De Gruyter) released this landmark work. 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 Dick’s 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.

https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/isbn/9783111346519/html

 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7665-6220

In 2016, Matthew Kelly (Editor, Springer VS) and Jared Bielby released the highly acclaimed, Information Cultures in the Digital Age. For several decades Rafael Capurro has been at the forefront of defining the relationship between information and modernity through both phenomenological and ethical formulations. In exploring both of these themes Capurro has re-vivified the transcultural and intercultural expressions of how we bring an understanding of information to bear on scientific knowledge production and intermediation. Capurro has long stressed the need to look deeply into how we contextualise the information problems that scientific society creates for us and to re-incorporate a pragmatic dimension into our response that provides a balance to the cognitive turn in information science. With contributions from 35 scholars from 15 countries, Information Cultures in the Digital Age focuses on the culture and philosophy of information, information ethics, the relationship of information to message, the historic and semiotic understanding of information, the relationship of information to power and the future of information education. This Festschrift seeks to celebrate Rafael Capurro’s important contribution to a global dialogue on how information conceptualisation, use and technology impact human culture and the ethical questions that arise from this dynamic relationship.   

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-658-14681-8

 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7665-6220