History of knowledge

Within academia, the history of knowledge is the field covering the accumulated and known human knowledge created or discovered during the history of the world and its historic forms, focus, accumulation, bearers,[1] impacts, mediations, distribution, applications, societal contexts, conditions[2] and methods of production. It is related to, yet separate from the history of science, the history of scholarship and the history of philosophy. The scope of the history of knowledge encompass all the discovered and created fields of human derived knowledge such as logic, philosophy, mathematics, science, sociology, psychology, data mining etc.

The history of knowledge has emerged since the 2000s with institutes such as the Geschichte des Wissens and has increased in relevance with the digital age.[3] Academics' consensus on the meaning and definition of ‘knowledge’ remains varied. Thus the scope is inherently broad within the field and researchers' areas of work are wide-ranging.[4] Despite contestability, advantages can be said of the field's approaches to how knowledge is transformed and how it has been utilised in the past.[5] Some of these approaches are based on the theories of Michel Foucault with concepts like ‘Orders of knowledge’[6] and Karl Mannheim.[5]