4 - The History of Learning and Research Infrastructures

Summary

Some fifty years after Francis Bacon had urged the study of the history of learning (historia literaria) in the early seventeenth century, this new discipline began to be developed in the Hamburg region. One of its main proponents was Daniel Georg Morhof, Major’s colleague at the University of Kiel. Major himself engaged in this study in many ways. The history of learning offered a platform for scholars to review the institutions, media, and genres of global knowledge from the dawn of time. Scholars studied how varying knowledge practices related to knowledge’s advance or decline. The premise of this study was that current scholarly practices in Europe were flawed and could be improved through attention to global epistemologies and practices. These views infused Major’s approaches, as in his attention to prehistoric knowledge or his study of global curating practices as the basis for a new approach to the museum. As this chapter explores, he also participated in the critical review and reform of knowledge infrastructures including dissertations, journal publications, critical commentary, citation practices, cataloging, note-taking, and ways of connecting disciplines together.