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Andrew M. Riggsby
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Mosaics of Knowledge: Representing Information in the Roman World (CLASSICAL CULTURE AND SOCIETY SERIES)

by Andrew M. Riggsby (Author)
5.0 5.0 out of 5 stars 4 ratings
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Today's information technology often seems to take on a life of its own, spreading into every part of our lives. In the Roman world things were different. Technologies were limited to small, scattered social groups.

By examining five technologies-lists, tables, weights and measures, artistic perspective, and mapping-Mosaics of Knowledge demonstrates how the Romans broke up a world we might have imagined them to unite. That is, the recording, storage, and recall of information in physical media might be expected to bind together persons distant in time and space. More often than not, however, Roman instances serve to create or reinforce the isolation of particular groups. Persons in different "locations"- whether those are geographical, social, or occupational-had access to quite different informational resources, and the overall situation is thus not controlled by the needs of any particular class or group. On the one hand, these constraints on use in turn constrain the development and power of individual technologies. Development is slow, scattered, and far from one-directional. On the other, seeming technological weaknesses can turn out to be illusory if we set them in actual use-contexts. Romans deploy no more but also no less "computing" power than needed for very narrowly defined goals.

This study combines detailed readings of a wide variety of evidence (inscriptions, small archeological finds, artworks, literary texts) with theoretical consideration of the social, cognitive, and material contexts for their use to present a unique portrait of Roman IT capabilities, limitations, and habits.
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  1. ISBN-10
    0197660622
  2. ISBN-13
    978-0197660621
  3. Publisher
    Oxford University Press
  4. Publication date
    October 7, 2022
  5. Language
    English
  6. Dimensions
    9.08 x 0.77 x 6.14 inches
  7. Print length
    272 pages
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Riggsby, professor in classics and of art history at the University of Texas, Austin, conducts a very scholarly guided tour of how the Romans represented information (via concepts such as lists, tables, weights and measures, landscapes, and more) ― often for very limited, rather than universal, uses. The best kind of academic work, rendering the commonplace unfamiliar. The landscape examples dazzle." -- Harvard Magazine

"Throughout this tome [Riggsby] is meticulous in discussing the views of other scholars and in providing evidence for his own theories. It is a work of specialised scholarship, rather than aimed at the general reader." -- Marion Gibbs, Classics for All

About the Author

Andrew M. Riggsby is a historian of the Roman world. Educated at Harvard and Berkeley, he is now Lucy Shoe Meritt Professor in Classics at the University of Texas at Austin. He is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome and was the Stanley Kelley Jr. Visiting Professor for Distinguished Teaching in Classics at Princeton University.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Oxford University Press (October 7, 2022)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 272 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0197660622
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0197660621
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 13.1 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 9.08 x 0.77 x 6.14 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    5.0 5.0 out of 5 stars 4 ratings

About the author

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Andrew M. Riggsby

Andrew M. Riggsby

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Andrew M. Riggsby is the Lucy Shoe Meritt Professor in Classics at the University of Texas at Austin. He holds a bachelor's degree from Harvard and Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. In addition to the books here, he has published numerous articles on various areas of Roman history, law, and culture. His War in Words: Caesar in Gaul and Rome (University of Texas Press, 2006) won the Association of American Publishers (Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division) award for the outstanding book published in Classics and Ancient History. He is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He has served as the Stanley Kelley Jr. Professor for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton University. He has been invited to speak in eleven countries on four continents, including venues such as Harvard, Yale, Oxford, Berlin, and the George Walsh Memorial Lecture at the University of Chicago. @AntiqueThought on Twitter.

Customer reviews

5 out of 5 stars
5 out of 5
4 global ratings

Top review from the United States

Melissa
5.0 out of 5 stars Perceptive and closely-argued analysis of information technology
Reviewed in the United States on June 16, 2020
This densely-argued book takes time to read but, for anyone interested in Roman information technology, it's well worth the effort. Each chapter deals with a different technology- tables, weights and measures, maps, and so on. The range of topics includes some that have been barely discussed previously in Roman scholarship, and others that have been extensively studied but which Riggsby wishes to analyze in a different way. This means that in each chapter there are new definitional issues and a new set of background scholarly literature to cover. Riggsby handles these well and clearly, but the necessary orientation at the beginning of each chapter does make the reading process more energy-intensive.

Overall, the insights of the book can be summed up briefly: Roman information technologies were context-specific, oriented to the task at hand, and tended to bring facts into being rather than record them afterwards (that last requires some explanation- read the book!). This resulted in fragmentation and, sometimes, a difficulty (or just lack of interest) in scaling up or being truly systematic. It's worth a slow read of the book to see how these insights play out in the different contexts and are built up by careful observations of specific examples. And, as Riggsby points out in his conclusion, much room remains for more analysis of these tendencies in space and time.
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