Within academia, the history of knowledge is the field covering the accumulated and known human knowledge constructed or discovered during human history and its historic forms, focus, accumulation, bearers, impacts, mediations, distribution, applications, societal contexts, conditions 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 and data mining. The history of knowledge is an academic discipline that studies forms of knowledge in the recorded past. The discipline emerged in the 2000s as a response to the digital age and was formally recognised with the introduction of disciplines such as Geschichte des Wissens and Wissenschaftsgeschichte in German academia. Academics within the field aim to research the forms, dissemination and production of knowledge with a focus on both "high" and "low" everyday knowledge. Research approaches are based on the theories of Michel Foucault with concepts like "orders of knowledge" and are similar to other fields with the use of social, cultural and political frameworks. The formation of the discipline has roots in the 1950s history of science field and contemporary concepts can be identified in works that go back to the 15th century. The extent studied within the field is dynamic as seen from the research of confessional knowledge to the digital revolution. Concepts applied in this specialty such as "scientification" explain the transformation of information to knowledge. "Scientification" is related to the description of "raw" information given by Peter Burke. Peter Burke is listed among some of the canon authors in the field alongside Martin Mulsow, Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault.
The history of the field Foundations of the history of knowledge have been traced by academics such as historian Peter Burke in works including "What is the History of Knowledge?". The book identifies the 15th century "Advancement of Learning" in which Francis Bacon writes on the circulation of knowledge. The concept of "circulation" has been used in the field of history since the 2000s and outlines the transfer of knowledge through actors or spaces. In the 19th century, academics expressed a want to historicise knowledge and look at the developments of knowledge. This is similar to the emergence of the history of natural sciences in the 19th century. The scientific philosopher Auguste Comte was one of the first to try to implement it in the university system. The philosopher illustrates the growing academic interest towards historicising knowledge. Following Comte, the 1960s second movement of the sociology of knowledge introduced ideas from Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu. Both authorities analogously impacted the history of knowledge evidenced by Foucault's work on knowledge production sites and Bourdieu's work on situated knowledge in Homo Academicus. The inception of the history of knowledge follows the history of science developments as an academic discipline. George Sarton, in the early years of the 20th century, advocated for a new practice to study the progress on the scientific and foresaw humanities use to science. By the 1950s and 60s, the history of science had implemented itself as an academic discipline in universities across America and Europe. The shift from the history of science to the German Wissenschaftsgeschichte (history of academic knowledge) involved the inclusion of the humanities and social sciences. The 2000s began the movement towards the German Wissensgeschichte, meaning the history of knowledge. Following the establishment of the history of knowledge, arguments occurred over whether the history of science should be absorbed by the history of knowledge. The history of knowledge's relevancy has coincided with the discussion of the academic term "knowledge society" as reflected in the need for knowledge management since the 1960s. It has also coincided with the study of the digital revolution which is seen as part of a series of knowledge revolutions. The age of the digital revolution has produced questions at how past knowledge has been circulated and generated. Peter Burke documents that the scholarship being increasingly globalized influenced the growth of the discipline, seen in the independent research in the 1990s with books like "Fields of Knowledge" (1992) and "Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge" (1996). Thereafter the history of knowledge discipline became institutionalized in the 2000s throughout Germany (Erfurt and Kiel).
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