Harris-McCoy, Daniel. "Review of Jason Konig, et al., eds. ORDERING KNOWLEDGE IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE." BMCR October 31, 2008.

König, Jason, and Tim Whitmarsh, eds. Ordering Knowledge in the Roman Empire. Cambridge: CUP, 2007. König and Whitmarsh's collection of eleven essays, whose origins can be traced to a 2001 conference held at St. John's College, Cambridge, is a welcome edition for what might be called the emerging field of the history of information science; that is, scholarship that investigates how data is collected, organized, and packaged for its consumers and the cultural forces -- philosophical, literary, political, etc. -- that underlie these activities. This field is relatively new to classical studies and owes its existence largely to Foucault's work on the relationship between knowledge and power, which in turn inspired landmarks in Greco-Roman scholarship such as Claude Nicolet's Space, Geography, and Politics in the Early Roman Empire and Andrew Wallace-Hadrill's now classic article "Mutatio Morum: The Idea of a Cultural Revolution." A flood of monographs on the relationship between mainly Roman technical and encyclopedic literature and their imperial contexts followed. Pliny's Natural History has received the most attention (Isager, Murphy, Carey) though other authors have also been examined using a political lens including Vitruvius (McEwen), Frontinus (Peachin), and others. König and Whitmarsh's volume is similarly interested in the intertwined relationship between the ordering of data and its Imperial context but excels its predecessors insofar as it takes pains to highlight the complexity of this relationship. This is partly the result of the range of authors and analytical tools that appear in the volume, bringing the markedly varied landscape of Imperial-era compilatory texts, their construction, and their motivations into sharp focus. . . . Read the whole review here: http://www.bmcreview.org/2008/10/20081039.html.