Throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the world witnessed exponential growth in the amount of information collected, stored, and analyzed. Not unrelatedly, the cost of storing, analyzing, and transmitting information has fallen exponentially during the same period, resulting in substantially greater access to and awareness of data. A few hundred years ago, the cost of storing the sum of written human knowledge exceeded the budgets of all but the very wealthiest institutions; today, the body of all written human knowledge can be accessed by a device that nearly half of the world’s population carries in their pocket. As a result, people have become somewhat desensitized to the purpose and presence of data in modern society. In order to understand the purpose of the data and knowledge we have accrued and stored – and which is intrinsically linked to informatics – it is useful to look back to a time when knowledge was genuinely scarce and expensive to access. To understand informatics, we must understand the importance of writing and knowledge systems through history.