James W. Cortada is a Senior Research Fellow at the Charles Babbage Institute at the University of Minnesota-Minneapolis. He holds a Ph.D. in modern history and spent nearly 4 decades working at IBM in various sales, managerial, and research positions. He has spent nearly a half-century at the center of much that went on in the world's engagement with computers and has written on its contemporary uses in business publications, history of computing, and on the history of information for over four decades. He has published over a dozen books on the role of information in modern society, including Fake News Nation: The Long History of Lies and Misinterpretations in America (R&L 2019), Building Blocks of Society: History, Information Ecosystems, and Infrastructures (R&L 2021) and Birth of Modern Facts: How the Information Revolution Transformed Academic Research, Governments, and Businesses (R&L 2023).
