Page 1 →Introduction
Shortly after Wikipedia’s launch in the earliest years of this century, it became the controversial subject of significant media attention. Its crowdsourced articles were heralded as both the best possible future of the intellectual commons and the demise of civilized, rigorously vetted reference texts. The encyclopedia became a digital community, a lynchpin, and a straw man as the English-language fork of the project grew exponentially in its first five years to include more than a million articles. The notion of a collective of thousands of humans and robots collaboratively writing an encyclopedia through incremental, public contributions disrupted cherished cultural tropes concerning authorship and even who or what an Author might be. It also disrupted conceptions of what constitutes writing by accepting not just contributions of narrative text and images but also metadata, links, information architecture structuring, code, and more. The popular conversations that ensued celebrated and decried the open, distributed nature of this monolithic project and the wiki platform that it is built on, provoking extensive discussion about the ways that technological affordances and constraints shift aspects of rhetorical agency in collaborative writing.
While it is true that wiki platforms support swift, large-scale collaboration that we have not been able to achieve in the past, the concept of a collaborative encyclopedia compiled through public contributions is not new, and neither are the cultural conditions that fostered it. More than 275 years ago, English editor and translator Ephraim Chambers mused on the intensely collaborative nature of the encyclopedia he was about to publish. As he worked among the publishing and knowledge work communities of Fleet Street and Holborn, Chambers deployed arguments for careful, unoriginal research, derivative works, and crowdsourcing that were forerunners of contemporary copyleft discourse and projects such as Wikipedia. His arguments in the 1728 preface of his foundational Cyclopædia are remarkably similar to contemporary arguments for Wikipedia, and Page 2 →he wrote extensively about the expectations and limits the encyclopedic genre imposes on authorial invention and originality and well as the sort of writing that it demands. While his project was necessarily situated in early modern concerns and the available technologies of the time, his attitudes and techniques in many ways presaged our contemporary discussions about distributed authorship and composing processes, as well as the ethics of owning a text comprising common knowledge gathered from disparate sources and recomposed into a “new” text. His name appears alone on the title page, and he was honored as the sole originator of the edition, but he understood the work as an intensive collaboration that was built on previously published source materials. His significant contribution, he argued, came through curating such an extensive collection of information into the final form of an authoritative, navigable encyclopedia.
Six years later, as he prepared the second edition, he issued a call for public contributions on any relevant topics. In an unusual move for his era, he explicitly defined this “public” as including women and working-class craftspeople rather than only literate gentlemen. He called for freemen and craft guild members to share their knowledge of “mysteries,” the practical trade secrets handed down orally from master craftsman to apprentice. He also invited contributions by illiterate individuals, saying that it would be a personal privilege to transcribe the first-hand knowledge they might possess about craftwork. In doing so he prepared to significantly expand not only the text, but also expectations of who might legitimately contribute to a reference text and what form those contributions might take.
This vision of intellectual democracy was a guiding principle in his development of a compendium that was intended to circulate knowledge to anyone who could access the text, and his revised edition included information that was pertinent to potential researchers from all social classes. His project, its structure of cross-indexed articles, and his calls for public contributions confirm that we have been dreaming for centuries of a networked, collaboratively composed encyclopedia, as not only Chambers but also later H. G. Wells,1 Vannevar Bush,2 and Ted Nelson3 proposed. Technical and scientific writers’ reliance on crowdsourcing stretches back even further to the efforts of astronomer Tycho Brahe and geographer Abraham Ortelius, both of whom involved crowds in research and development of their central contributions to science.
The Romantic ideal of the solitary, originary, proprietary author has permeated our culture since the late eighteenth century, but in Ephraim Chambers’s time it was a more nascent cultural concept that had been commodified only with the passage of the Statute of Anne in 1710, approximately a decade before he started work on his project. These authors produce work through their own original genius and are understood as being “unique individual[s] uniquely Page 3 →responsible for a unique product.”4 In the centuries since, this construction of capital-A Authorship has become naturalized through juridical discourse and the convention of associating an authorial signature with creative ownership of a work. The digital age explicitly challenged this construct, which had already been destabilized by modern and postmodern critics. Wikipedia represents an ongoing contemporary challenge to the form of identifiable authorship that is rewarded not just in copyright law but within the academy in the form of grades and tenure.
This book offers a comparative, historical study of authorship and rhetorical agency in these two encyclopedias that have both explicitly challenged common viewpoints on writers, composing processes, and textual products. A deep look into the ecology of communities and ideas that supported the development work of these encyclopedias reveals a different, more distributed account than our contemporary narrative of authorship often offers. The invention process of these encyclopedias is a social act, to borrow Karen Burke LeFevre’s term.5 Their development within the pressures of the English Enlightenment and the early twenty-first century copyleft movement was supported by philosophically committed social and professional networks. These contributors supported the production through textual contributions, but also, importantly, through material contributions such as apprenticeships, subscriptions, and donations, and influenced the ethos of the project through often-overlooked elements like typesetting decisions, template coding, and coding automated entities that themselves become active nonhuman contributors. Each of the humans and nonhumans in these collectives, along with the beliefs that they fostered, promoted, and had imposed on them, serves as a point of articulation in the social life of the these encyclopedias. Each offers clues regarding the social forces and technologies that shape the rhetorical agency available to textual curators.
I will demonstrate that the labor of distributed authorship is accomplished not by just the usual suspects denoted by the authorial signature and the publisher’s imprint, but a broader collective of humans and nonhumans who perform the work of composing an encyclopedia. Members of this collective include human writers, editors, publishers, coders, funding donors, and readers, but also technological agents such as printing presses,6 the web, and robots who edit, create maps, and write text. This inclusive definition of curatorial collectives leads us to a fuller consideration of the articulated labor of authorship alongside naturalized beliefs about the actants who labor and the essence of their labor. Together all these members form what we might understand as the cultural construct of the Encyclopedist.7 Composed of the individual performances of its constituent actants, this collective performs a specialized form of agency. No individual actant has complete control of the text, although some exert significantly more power than others. For example, even while we might celebrate the individual author or Page 4 →the publisher’s contributions to these intensively collaborative texts, their work is always rewritten by readers performing nonlinear readings of a text that progress according to individual interests and serendipitous links. The encyclopedia itself is the central locus around which all these elements coalesce.
Through comparative analysis of the texts that make up Chambers’s Cyclopædia and Wikipedia as well as the discourse surrounding these encyclopedias, I examine the compositional work performed by writers working within strict genre conventions that do not place a premium on originality. This exploration significantly revises long-held notions of authorial agency, autonomy, originality, and authority. It establishes the continuity of “new” textual activities such as wikis with long-standing authorial practices that I call textual curation, and it demonstrates the highly contextual nature of authorial agency. Comparison of analog and networked texts also lays bare the impact of technological developments, both in the compositional process and the topics that can practically be included in such a text. Herein lies a second assumption inherent in this study: that new textual forms and new media artifacts nearly always—if not always—have precedents. One technology does not necessarily replace another; rather, new technologies reinforce and reinterpret older technological forms.8 The telegraph, which enabled instantaneous, long-distance communication for the first time, was a nineteenth-century precedent to the speed and reach of the Internet.9 Camera obscuras and panoramas were used as early virtual reality devices in the eighteenth century, as were zograscopes.10 Later stereograph cards and viewing devices afforded a similar experience,11 and their widespread circulation through both independent and catalogue distribution served as an early, less democratic precedent to current image-sharing applications such as Flickr and Instagram.
The same is true for genres, Charles Bazerman has pointed out: “by examining the emergence of a genre, we can identify the kinds of problems the genre was attempting to solve and how it went about solving them.”12 Examining the cultural context and networks that the Cyclopædia emerged from, as well as examining it against Wikipedia, provides a clear vantage point for locating the problems that the modern encyclopedia works to address. The goals of the encyclopedic project remain much the same over time, although the technical affordances have changed. Taken together these genre-based elements challenge contemporary ideas concerning radical differences between print and digital authorship as well as the notion that new media intellectual property issues lack historical precedent.
Curation
Curation is both a popular and an interdisciplinary term, and its interdisciplinary aspects are an important reason that I use it to describe the compositional work Page 5 →that this book explores. The word has been in the vernacular since the mid-seventeenth century, but it has enjoyed an explosion over the past decade. It is a term I first began using one morning in 2007 as I struggled to describe my research on the labor of composing reference texts composition to my writing partner, who was himself working on rhetorical aspects of museums. These days curation has moved out of the museum and into popular discussions of working with almost any everyday collection, most particularly digital ones. By 2009 the South by Southwest Interactive conference featured a panel entitled “Curating the Crowd-sourced World,”13 and the term “community-curated work” began to appear as an alternative to the older term “user-generated content” in discussions about wikis.14 In April of that year, the Business Insider claimed that “curation is the new role of media professionals . . . separating the wheat from the chaff, assigning editorial weight, and—most importantly—giving folks who don’t want to spend their lives looking for an editorial needle in a haystack a high-quality collection of content that is contextual and coherent.”15
These days the word has proliferated even further and is usually meant to describe the curator’s primary task as one of filtering an immense amount of information through the critical lens of one’s own sensibilities (most often, one’s aesthetic sensibilities). There are curation apps such as PearlTrees and Storify to deploy, curation communities like Pinterest to join, curation contests to enter in online home design and personal fashion communities. The New York Times noted that curation is now the provenance of most any creative type: “among designers, disc jockeys, club promoters, bloggers and thrift-store owners, curate is code for “I have a discerning eye and great taste.”16 Everyone is a curator, it seems, as we struggle to make meaning within the information overload of the postmodern world, most particularly the unyielding data stream that is the web.
The problem with this increasing ubiquity of the term is that along the way, we have robbed it of its meaning. Describing and assigning meaning to curation as mere filtration, aggregation, or collection strips this compositional work of the essential skill and craft performed through the curator’s labor. Those of us who work in fields that have adopted “curation” to describe filtered and recomposed compositions may forget that curation is a specialized craft and field of study in multiple curation-focused disciplines that award advanced degrees, train specialists, launch distinguished careers, and create robust scholarship.17
I draw definitions primarily from museum studies and library science because of their long-standing, deep considerations of carefully collected and arranged sets of information.18 Both disciplines work to order collected, filtered knowledge in ways that are publicly accessible not only textually but also in terms of findability and structure. Both are also deeply concerned with the preservation of information. Encyclopedias, museums, and reference libraries also share common Page 6 →Enlightenment-era intersections, most notably through the older cabinets of curiosities and private collections that ordered and examined the natural world. The curatorial skills involved are hardly new: the term first appeared in English in 1769.19 Patrick J. Boylan, professor emeritus of heritage policy and management at City University London, traced the advent of specialized training in museum curation to the École du Louvre’s 1870 offerings and noted a proliferation of museum studies degree courses in South America and the UK during the 1920s and 1930s.20 Library science has been concerned with findability, metadata, and circulation since Melvil Dewey launched the field’s first formal program in the United States at Columbia University in 1887. Both disciplines, along with art history, understand the skill and labor entailed in curation in specifically defined ways that are closely tied to learned craftsmanship. Their definitions can and should shape our own understanding of textual curation, since they shed light on specialized forms of compositional work: most particularly the work of composing texts that comprise collected, filtered, ordered information that must be rendered into a narrative, navigable form.
This work bears significant resemblance to Boylan’s description of eighteenth-century museum curation: “Scholar-curators undertook almost all of the museums’ specialized work: acquiring collections, specimens, and works of art, researching cataloguing, and documenting their collections, and interpreting and communicating their significance through the museum’s permanent display galleries, temporary exhibitions, publications, and educational programs such as lectures and guided visits.”21 To say that a text has a curator conveys an appropriately heavier emphasis on the specific performance of authorial agency demonstrated in critical assessment, recomposition, and arrangement of previously disseminated work, moving the emphasis further from individual originality. It also more accurately describes the unending work of curating a living text or body of knowledge that is in constant flux, much as the work of curating a museum is never complete until the museum is shuttered. As Simmons University library and information science professor Ross Harvey has asserted, curation of library collections is “concerned with actively managing data for as long as it continues to be of scholarly, scientific, research, administrative, and/or personal interest, with the aims of supporting reproducibility, reuse of, and adding value to that data, managing it from its point of creation until it is determined not to be useful, and ensuring its long-term accessibility, preservation, authenticity, and integrity.”22 This work of collaboratively collecting, filtering, recomposing, taxonomizing, and managing information is essential not only to museum and library curation but also to textual curation. So too are the “invisible texts” that function in conjunction with the primary reference text, such as controlled vocabularies, taxonomies, strategic linking and cross-indexing, and metadata. Johndan Page 7 →Johnson-Eilola has written about the ways that symbolic-analytic tasks such as filtering, sorting, connecting, synthesizing, and sharing have become central for scholars who seek to efficiently work with ever-growing streams of information.23 Arranging, interconnecting, and recomposing are essential skills; these skills may manifest themselves in the everyday life of a writer through something as simple as a carefully ordered stack of books relevant to a chapter that is under construction or as complex as a cross-referenced, tagged, categorized reading blog that also links to external sources. Such structuring is deeply familiar work to any writer who works extensively with digital information.
This understanding of the labor processes associated with composing in current digital environments leads us to a different conceptualization of collaboratively produced digital information structures, whatever their genre: open, interconnected, and not necessarily finished in the ways that we previously deemed projects to be complete once they were published and distributed as print artifacts. We typically consider print compositions to have reached a terminal point in development when they are published and made available to an audience. Print encyclopedias are always instantly dated; for the past three hundred years in the West, we have always understood that a new edition is forthcoming. Digital environments negate this terminal moment, holding texts in a state of potential. As multiple commentators have noted, Wikipedia’s value lies in its constant updates, ongoing project development, and minimal distribution costs. We understand it as always and ever under construction. This distinction is important if we are to understand the always-in-process nature of textual curation, particularly in networked environments. They are process, not product, and require terminology that acknowledges as much.
The process of curation is always rhetorical, as composing processes necessarily are. The authors of the UCLA “Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0” describe curation as simultaneously persuasive, technical, and technological, focused on “making arguments through objects as well as words, images, and sounds. . . . It is a medium with its own distinctive language, skill sets, and complexities; a medium currently in a phase of transformation and expansion as virtual galleries, learning environments, and worlds become important features of the scholarly landscape. Curation also implies custodial responsibilities with respect to the remains of the past as well as interpretive, meaning-making responsibilities with respect to the present and future.” Curation, then, is a rhetorical, dynamic skill set that pays close attention to the very skills that Andrea Lunsford called for in the field of digital composition a decade ago in her keynote address to the 2005 Computers and Writing Conference: “Writing: A technology for creating conceptual frameworks and creating, sustaining, and performing lines of thought within those frameworks, drawing from and expanding on existing conventions Page 8 →and genres, utilizing signs and symbols, incorporating materials drawn from multiple sources, and taking advantage of the resources of a full range of media.”24 The essential aspects of curation are among those found in her definition of writing itself: creating conceptual frameworks through the process of building taxonomies and architectures, expanding on existing conventions and genres, utilizing signs in symbols in the form of navigational aspects and strategic linking, and recomposing text by incorporating materials drawn from multiple resources. Curation is writing, regardless of how small or invisible its texts might be. Tracing the work of textual curation helps us consider not only its rhetorical aspects, but also essential skills for functional digital writing that our students must learn in digital writing curricula.
Artifacts
The two artifacts that I trace this labor within emerged at distinct cultural moments that bear some striking resemblances, despite their taking place in separate centuries, countries, and technological eras. Chambers’s Cyclopædia emerged during a rich period of encyclopedic development and publication that was tied to the Enlightenment, which had swept Europe before finally arriving in England. This encyclopedia set the standard for many elements that we now consider to be fundamental features of the encyclopedic genre, including comprehensiveness, cross-indexing, and alphabetization. He understood his extensive curatorial work as a very specific form of authorship, and so did his publishers: when the first edition quickly became one of the more valuable publishing properties in London, they awarded him a stipend of £500 and he was swiftly inducted into the prestigious ranks of the Royal Society. Its interventions in the field of British reference text publishing were so significant that it is sometimes erroneously referred to as the first encyclopedia to introduce these organizational schemas. The English had not entirely neglected early developments in the encyclopedic tradition, having by that time developed a significant tradition of handbooks and lexicons.25 Among these texts was James le Palmer’s Omne Bonum, which had introduced alphabetization as an organizational schema for reference texts in 1380,26 but this method of ordering was not widely adopted at the time.27 Bacon’s plans for the Great Instauration had set the new Western standard for careful planning of encyclopedic projects that were based on topical arrangements. This schema was also in particularly heavy use in the French encyclopedias that proliferated during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which the British heavily relied on.28
Chambers stepped into this rich reference tradition—right into the midst of it, actually—by adopting John Harris’s Lexicon Technicum; or, An universal English dictionary of the arts and sciences, explaining not only the terms of arts, but the arts themselves (1704) as the initial textual platform on which he began to build the Page 9 →Cyclopædia. The Lexicon Technicum was the first purely English general encyclopedia, and it concentrated on pragmatic and technical topics. It was influenced by one network that would later foster Chambers’s own work: the Royal Society. Harris was himself a Fellow of the Royal Society and consequently had access to many of the foremost scholars of his day. Collison wrote that “his use of the works of such scientists as Ray and Newton is probably the first example of an encyclopedia-maker drawing directly on the advice and help of experts and, as such, is the original precursor of the modern system of inviting contributions from specialists.”29 This reliance on direct collaboration with subject-matter experts later became an essential element of the composing process for English-language reference texts such as the Britannica and Oxford English Dictionary, and Chambers adopted it more directly in his second edition. But even as he first took up the work of expanding the Lexicon, he began incorporating a much wider range of resources and topics.
The Cyclopædia’s influence in British and American print culture was far reaching throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Elements of the preface and structure are recognizable in the preface to Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language.30 Several of its lengthy technical passages also appear in Tristram Shandy. Sterne’s descriptions are only slightly modified and might be regarded as plagiarism today.31 Scientific definitions from the Cyclopædia likewise appear later in Melville’s work, with the most notable instances occurring in Moby Dick.32 The Cyclopædia also influenced at least two of the American founding fathers. Although a young Ben Franklin immediately discontinued the practice of running excerpts from it on the front page of the Pennsylvania Gazette when he bought it, he relied on it as a resource and continued to occasionally reprint entries.33 Thomas Jefferson’s plans for the Montalto Observatory may also have been influenced by Chambers’s entry on the topic.34
The necessary tradition of encyclopedic works building on previously published reference works has resulted in, among other things, a traceable genealogical relationship between the two central artifacts of this study. The Cyclopædia’s translation into French by John Mills and Gottfried Sellius formed the preliminary base of the Encyclopédie after its initial publisher, André Le Breton, contractually licensed the Cyclopædia in 1745.35 The Encyclopédie in turn spurred development of Scotland’s Encyclopaedia Britannica; large sections were translated back into English to form part of the first edition text, which in turn formed the basis for subsequent editions. A full port of the 1911 Britannica, which is in the public domain, served as the initial textual base of Wikipedia, effectively making the Cyclopædia its textual great-grandparent. In addition to being composed by central writers or groups of writers who develop texts through filtration and recomposition of prior knowledge, both of these texts have relied on submissions from the Page 10 →public. Examining the compositional processes and rhetorical context of these two bookends of the Western encyclopedic tradition provides a snapshot of the modern encyclopedic genre at its inception and most recent iteration.
The thoroughly digital project that is Wikipedia arose from many of the same impetuses as the Cyclopædia, albeit within distinctly twenty-first-century contexts. From the beginning Wikipedia has been directed and evangelized by venture capitalist Jimmy Wales. As the public face (but never signed Author) of Wikipedia, Wales’s recognitions are comparable to Chambers’s in contemporary digerati terms: he’s been awarded numerous honorary degrees, named a fellow of Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society and one of Time’s 100 Top Scientists and Thinkers of 2006, and appointed to the advisory board of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. From 2000 to 2002 he was assisted by Larry Sanger, who has claimed that he is also a cofounder of the project.36 The text itself began as a project fork of Nupedia, an elaborate expert-written free encyclopedia that employed a seven-level vetting process. When the project produced only two dozen articles after a year and a half of work and US$250,000 invested, Wales and Sanger abandoned it after a server failure and launched a free-content version of the project. The wiki environment offered an open, flexible platform that quickly began to attract an initial community of contributors.
By October 2005 the encyclopedia was growing by fifteen hundred new articles per day.37 Alexa, an early and prominent web analytics company, listed it as the thirty-second-most-visited site on the Internet on January 9, 2006; by November 1 of the following year it was consistently in the top ten, where it has remained ever since. Small contributions by more than nineteen million registered users have resulted in more than five million articles as of this writing. Wikipedia has been consistently in the news for fifteen years now, and for many reasons: its very existence (at first), for minor scandals, as a real-time news resource during major events such as tsunamis and elections, and for its ongoing fund-raising and international expansion efforts.
On many levels the project enacts the hopes and plans that Chambers wrote about nearly 275 years earlier. Wikipedia is an open-access encyclopedia that claims no ownership of the communally sourced and produced knowledge that its community curates. Chambers’s Cyclopædia was composed as the English Enlightenment’s push toward extending the investigations of natural philosophy gained momentum. It was part of a coordinated effort to broadcast the fundamentals of then-controversial Newtonian scientific principles beyond closed communities of like-minded individuals to the public, the Continent, and beyond.38 Its sections on military, religious, and legal matters also implicitly addressed the need to order knowledge and make it accessible to as many people as possible.
Similarly Wikipedia arose from the intersection of multiple cultural factors: Page 11 →the continuing Western push toward a networked encyclopedia, open-source software development culture, the open-access movement, and the technological affordances of the postmillennial read-write web. In much the same way that the Cyclopædia was heavily influenced by the Enlightenment project and its stakeholders, Wikipedia’s development has been driven by a postmillennial commitment to public curation of the ever-expanding frontiers of civilization’s knowledge, from scientific advances to significant events. As a project that exists within an almost infinitely expandable digital platform, Wikipedia also catalogues information that marks it as distinctly of its own culture and era: significant moments in popular culture, famous personages, and the like. Throughout its development process, the central community has the ethos of open access that developed in the pre–web 2.0 Internet and open-access communities39 and was then pushed to the forefront by the Creative Commons movement in 2001, the same year Wikipedia was launched.40
The affordances of digital mediums make it possible for the collaborative labor of distributed authorship to be negotiated in asynchronous environments without central oversight, and freedom from the constraints of printed text means that Chambers’s vision of contributions from anyone with sufficient expertise and access can indeed theoretically be realized. However, the distributed structure of its collaborative labor necessarily means that it lacks the central curatorial oversight that Chambers provided for the Cyclopædia. This openness also means that casual contributors and readers become a much more active part of the production process in both productive and negative ways. While Wikipedia’s considerable expansion and quality rests entirely on volunteer labor, vandalism, misinformation, and spam are persistent issues that require community time and effort to police.
Accounting for the broader ecologies within which these two encyclopedias have flourished opens space to investigate the vital points of articulation that influence performances of authorial agency. These include cultural moments, material factors such as technological developments and production processes, the reading audience, and the discourses that ultimately surround the published text. Doing so moves us away from a notion of compositional processes and authorial agency that is confined to the small world of a writer, an editor, a text (and often a classroom). It also challenges the false division that positions these actors as both distinct and distant from readers and nonhumans.
This direct comparison of the oldest and most recent iterations of comprehensive Western encyclopedias brings into sharp relief the differences—and just as important, the similarities—between these two artifacts. This strategic juxtaposition necessarily requires negotiating a rather wide chronological span, and this study takes what Debra Hawhee and Christa Olson have termed a pan-historiographic Page 12 →approach. Selecting distinct, rich slices of time affords a focus on “residual accumulation of topoi, beliefs, and strategic practices, [which] brings its own kind of depth,” they argued.41 Closely examining the rhetorical nature of these two commons-based encyclopedias and the processes that were used to make them allows us to get at different questions concerning authorship and agency than would an account of the interstitial projects published in the 275 years between these two encyclopedias, many of which are deeply dependent on a culture (and cult) of expertise for their composition and production.
In order to develop a grounded view of this authorial work and its processes, this study brings together a variety of forms of evidence. I rely on extensive archival research to recover as much information as possible about Chambers’s own work and the collectives that supported and contributed to the Cyclopædia. My work offers new tracings of Chambers’s life by illuminating the ways that the then-nascent United Grand Lodge of England, which was working in conjunction with the Royal Society to evangelize Newtonian science across the United Kingdom and the Continent, supported the development and production of this encyclopedia. Chambers himself did not leave behind a rich amount of archival material to work with: as someone whose material wealth largely consisted of a personal library that was too large for his extended family to manage, many of his papers and belongings were either sold, destroyed, or lost after his death. What material would have remained in the archives of the Longman and Midwinter publishing houses was destroyed when the Luftwaffe bombed the areas surrounding Fleet Street and Paternoster Row during the Blitz. The Gray’s Inn library and archives were also largely destroyed, along with the inn’s other major buildings and the multiunit structure that Chambers leased a large apartment in for many years.42 Fortunately he left a voluminous preface, a précis for the second edition, and the second edition itself, which include his written thoughts on the problems of encyclopedic authorship. It is also possible to trace various supporting collectives, most especially in the archives of the Royal Society and United Grand Lodge of England, which have remained intact over the centuries. I am necessarily indebted to Robert Collison and Richard Yeo’s careful recovery work on the Cyclopædia’s publication history. With its vast public archives, Wikipedia presents the opposite problem for researchers, since each individual article’s publication histories and development conversations are public, as are all of Wikimedia’s annual reports. The nonprofit’s ethos of openness also dictates that regularly issued updates on infrastructure and interface development are publicly archived. These documents have been a rich resource.
I provide examples from a variety of article types and the discourse surrounding them, including a selected number of articles on topics that are directly comparable between Wikipedia and the first and second editions of the Cyclopædia. Page 13 →Selection of a random sample is complicated by the chronologically specific topics that these texts cover. The permanence of print also presents a complication: The Cyclopædia did not include entries on specific places, people, or news events because the tediousness of gathering this information and the changeable nature of these topics were simply outside the purview of a laborious project that was printed and revised approximately once a decade. Working from the most granular brackets of Chambers’s 1728 taxonomy of knowledge (pictured on page 99), I selected articles on topics that had retained their popular meaning and centrality over the time span between these two texts, eliminating topics such as spherics, conics, and dialling. After further eliminating articles that comprised less than one hundred words in either text and fewer than ten edits in Wikipedia, I narrowed the sample to five articles on the following topics: Minerals, Trigonometry, Fortification, Falconry, and Garden. This limited sample of approximately 10,700 edits was hand-coded for edit types, typographic shifts, and human or nonhuman compositional work. This sort of coding relies on human judgment and cannot be automated, which necessarily limits the scope of the sample. The resulting data is not generalizable in the same way that a big data study that relies on computerized analysis would be, but it provides valuable insight into writing practices, individual edit type and size, and the contributions of production community members and technological agents. Taken together the examples and data reveal the distributed nature of authorial and rhetorical agency in encyclopedic texts and the extent of the ways that rhetorical agency is distributed among human and nonhuman agents.