Page 139 →Notes

Introduction

1. Wells, The World Brain.
2. Bush, “As We May Think.”
3. Nelson, Literary Machines 93.1.
4. Woodmansee, “Genius and the Copyright,” 38.
5. LeFevre, Invention as a Social Act.
6. For an extensive treatment, see Maruca, The Work of Print.
7. I do not substantially address related external elements such as juridical factors, for instance, or the role of the authorial signature within print economies. Relatedly, because of the encyclopedic reader’s active contributions, I do not consider the reader an “external factor” or an entity that the text is bequeathed to after publication, especially in digital contexts.
8. Bolter and Grusin, Remediation; Gitelman, Always Already New; Pingree and Gitelman, “Introduction: What’s New about New Media?”; Kaufer and Carley, “Some Concepts and Axioms about Communication”; Park, Jankowski, and Jones, The Long History of New Media.
9. Standage, The Victorian Internet; Stubbs, “Telegraphy’s Corporeal Fictions.”
10. Blake, “Zograscopes.”
11. Schiavo, “From Phantom Image to Perfect Vision.”
12. Bazerman, “The Case for Writing Studies as a Major Discipline.”
13. Bekman, Johnson, McEvoy, Hostetler, and Trapani, “Curating the Crowdsourced World.”
14. “Community-Curated Works.”
15. Rosenbaum, “Can ‘Curation’ Save Media?”
16. A. Williams, “On the Tip of Creative Tongues.”
17. In addition to the primary suspects that I discuss here, some examples include information architecture, which has become an established field of study over the past two decades, and metadata, which now sees dedicated graduate-level courses and is rapidly becoming its own area of specialization.
18. Both fields increasingly offer focused certification in digital curation. See Johns Hopkins University’s Certificate in Digital Curation offered by their Museum Studies Program and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s similarly named certificate, as well as interdisciplinary programs at the University of Maine, UC Berkeley, San Jose State, and the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana.
19. “Curation.”
20. Boylan, “The Museum Profession.”
21. Ibid., 418.
22. Harvey, Digital Curation, 8. An important aspect of curation that I have not mentioned in this study is preservation, for reasons related to both disciplinarity and space. Preservation of digital media artifacts is a core skill taught in each curation certificate that is currently offered in the United States. The scholarship in this area largely stems from library science, which offers wonderfully pragmatic work on dealing with the very real problems of file degradation and technological obsolescence in media-rich collections. Matthew Kirschenbaum’s award-winning Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination offers an English studies perspective. His attention to affordances of media storage devices makes a persuasive argument for continued attention to the material conditions of preservation.
The field of rhetorical studies has much to offer this area of inquiry, especially in investigations Page 140 →of technological affordances for preservation that are commonly deployed in distributed collaboration systems. Wikipedia preserves not only a record of every edit since its inception, but also a dynamic file of every single iteration of every single page that has existed in the system at any point in time. This vast record offers not just one of the world’s largest banks of data on distributed collaborative practices, but an incredible open archive of material for investigations into rhetorical aspects of automated, iterative, public preservation.
23. Johnson-Eilola, “Among Texts.”
24. Lunsford, “Writing, Technologies, and the Fifth Canon,” 171, emphasis mine.
25. The two encyclopedias I examine are slices of time in a long tradition of reference texts that stretches back to antiquity. As Bernadette Longo, Pamela Long, and others have argued extensively, the handbook tradition represents an important early development in both technical communication authorship and reference texts. Reference genres stretch back at least to the Phaedrus (370 B.C.E.) and Protragoras, (380 B.C.E.), which functioned as proprietary resources for rhetorical education. During that same century, Iktinos, the architect of the Parthenon, collaborated with Kallikates on an architecture handbook that became a central resource in that field. In his foundational history of encyclopedias, Robert Collison acknowledged the first Roman encyclopedia as Cato’s Paecepta Ad Filium, introduced in 183 B.C.E., but Pliny the Elder’s Historia Naturalis (77 C.E.) is still widely considered the first major Western encyclopedic work. Despite the single authorial name it is attributed to, its development was also supported by a network. The encyclopedist’s nephew, Pliny the Younger, later described his uncle’s activities to a correspondent, noting the multiple laborers that contributed by reading passages aloud to the encyclopedist, taking dictation and notes, and performing other secretarial duties, as Long describes. However, Collison also has pointed to the Ikhwan al-Safa’s Rasa’ulu Ikhwan al Safa, which appeared in 980, as “the first example of collaboration in encyclopedia-making” (41–42). The collaborative nature of both of these texts demonstrates that even before the onset of early modern information overload, the immense work of composing large reference texts demanded the labor of more than one person.
As the centuries progressed, the major world cultures each produced their own extensive encyclopedias; perhaps the most prominent were the Chinese Huang Ian and the Arabic Kitab ‘Uyun al-Akhbar. The British came rather late to the genre when the Scottish monk Richard of St. Victor compiled the Liber Excerptionum. In 1380 the Strasburg abbess Herrad produced the Hortus Delicarum, a scientific and theological compendium, which is commonly considered the first encyclopedia produced by a woman. The transition from scientific compendium to the modern encyclopedia was bridged in 1315 with the Compendium Philosophiae, and the term “encyclopedia” entered the lexicon with Paul Scalich’s encyclopedia, Seu Orbis Disciplinarum, slightly more than two centuries later.
26. Sandler, “Notes for the Illuminator.”
27. Daly, Contributions to a History.
28. Collison, Encyclopedias, 99.
29. Ibid.
30. Espinasse, “Ephraim Chambers”; Kolb and Sledd, “Johnson’s ‘Dictionary’”; Mack, “The Historicity of Johnson’s Lexicographer.”
31. Greenberg, “Laurence Sterne and Chambers’ Cyclopædia.”
32. Hillway, “Melville’s Education in Science”; Leonard, “Descartes, Melville, and the Mardian Vortex.”
33. Mott, American Journalism.
34. Donnelly, “Jefferson’s Observatory Design.”
35. Collison, Encyclopedias, 119.
36. Sanger, “The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia”; Lih, The Wikipedia Revolution.
37. Giles, “Special Report.”
38. Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment.
39. For in-depth examinations of the historical development of this ethos in very early Internet communities, see Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture; and Rheingold, The Virtual Community.
40. For more on the historical development of copyright and copyleft arguments in the United States, see Litman, Digital Copyright; and Vaidhyanathan, Copyrights and Copywrongs. For examples of the popular arguments that drove the expansion of Creative Commons licenses in the first decade Page 141 →of the twenty-first century, see Lessig, Free Culture. For more on the argument for open access, see Willinsky, The Access Principle. For more on pragmatics of open access, see Suber, Open Access.
41. Hawhee and Olson, “Pan-historiography,” 93.
42. Cowper, A Prospect of Gray’s Inn, 141. Cowper provides a consolidated history of the inn from 1506 until the 1980s.

Chapter 1: Distributed Curatorial Practices

1. Chambers, Cyclopædia, xxix. Emphasis in the original.
2. Ibid.
3. Chambers, “Preface,” a.
4. Chambers, “Preface,” xxix.
5. In pursuing this practice, he adopted a policy similar to Wikipedia’s “no original research” policy.
6. Chambers, “Preface,” xxix. His argument prefigures Thomas Jefferson’s more famous 1813 contention that “he who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air . . . incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation” (Writings 13:333–35). An essential difference is Chambers’s focus on textual borrowing and Jefferson’s arguments for limited ownership of patents in developing nations in order to promote cultural and economic growth.
7. See U.S.C. 17 §101. He also made no claims of ownership on the prior texts or the information conveyed by them, instead focusing his claims entirely on the text at hand, a move that is also in line with our legal conception of derivative works.
8. Chambers, “Preface,” xxx.
9. Chambers, “Preface,” i.
10. Chambers, “Preface,” xxx.
11. Chambers, Cyclopædia, i.
12. For more on the nomination of professional men and the intersections between the Royal Society and the more egalitarian membership of the United Grand Lodge of London, see Berman’s comprehensive study, Foundations of Modern Freemasonry.
13. Chambers, “Considerations Preparatory,” 3
14. Chambers, “Considerations Preparatory,” 4.
15. Macbean’s dates of service to Chambers are not known. He was later an amanuensis to Samuel Johnson. See Seccombe, “Macbean, Alexander (d. 1784).”
16. Quoted in Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions, 143.
17. “Ephraim Chambers to Macbean,” 413.
18. The expanded second edition of the Cyclopædia presumably incorporated these submissions. To my knowledge there is no existing data regarding how many submissions were received or how many were incorporated. There is no indication in the text of which bits of information (or even entire articles) might have come from readers.
19. Biagioli and Galison, Scientific Authorship.
20. Chambers, Considerations Preparatory, 4.
21. Even earlier encyclopedic projects had also made use of collaborative writing practices, most especially in community-based projects produced by academies or monasteries. For more on monastic traditions of collaboration, see Trithemius, In Praise of Scribes; and Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change.
22. Collison, Encyclopedias; Mugglestone, Lost for Words; Winchester, The Meaning of Everything.
23. One exception to this incremental process is occasions when significant prior texts have been imported wholesale, such as when the 1911 Britannica was imported as the initial data dump.
24. For more on the reader-as-writer of nonnarrative texts, see Eco, Magli and Otis, “Greimassian Semantics and the Encyclopedia.”
25. Lunsford and Ede, Singular Texts/Plural Authors, 133.
26. Page 142 →Gurak, Cyberliteracy.
27. Pigg, “Coordinating Constant Invention”; Sawyer, Group Genius; Spinuzzi, “Guest Editor’s Introduction: Technical Communication in the Age of Distributed Work”; Tapscott and Williams, Wikinomics.
28. Benkler, The Wealth of Networks and The Penguin and the Leviathan; Tapscott and Williams, Wikinomics.
29. See, among others, A. Davis, Webb, Lackey, and DeVoss, “Remix, Play, and Remediation”; Logie, “The (Re)Birth of the Composer” and “Peeling the Layers of the Onion.”
30. Aufderheide and Jaszi, Reclaiming Fair Use; Fisher, Promises to Keep; Lessig, Code, The Future of Ideas, and Remix; Litman, Digital Copyright; Patry, Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars; Vaidhyanathan, Copyright and Copywrongs. See also Biagioli, Jaszi, and Woodmansee, Making and Unmaking Intellectual Property.
31. See Jenkins, Textual Poachers; Navas, Gallagher, and burrough, The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies.
32. Barthes, “The Death of the Author”; Foucault, “What Is an Author?”
33. In addition to Barthes and Foucault, see Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind; Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play”; Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus; Kristeva, Desire in Language, among others.
34. See Rebecca Moore Howard’s extensive work on this topic for more on the nuances of constructing, policing, and punishing plagiarism, in particular Standing in the Shadow of Giants and “Postpedagogical Reflections on Plagiarism and Capital.”
35. Woodmansee, “Genius and the Copyright,” 38.
36. See Milton, “Areopagitica”; Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding; Donaldson v. Beckett; U.S. Const., Art. I, §8, cl. 8; U.S.C., Title 17, §102 and §106.
37. Rose, Authors and Owners.
38. Ezell, Social Authorship and the Advent of Print.
39. For fuller histories of English print culture and the emergence of copyright, see Johns, The Nature of the Book and Piracy; Maruca, The Work of Print; Patterson, Copyright in Historical Perspective; Rose, Authors and Owners.
40. Campbell, “Agency: Promiscuous and Protean,” 7.
41. Collin Brooke, Lingua Fracta.
42. If, indeed, it was ever possible for a single person to take on this sort of project. Pamela Long has pointed to Pliny the Elder’s nephew’s account of his uncle’s devotion to assembling his ancient encyclopedia. Extensive servant help with small daily matters enabled him to work continuously: for instance books were read aloud to him while he ate a dinner prepared by others and took notes. He also studied or took notes while being bathed and while being transported about town on a litter to meetings. Additionally he employed a secretary to assist him in the work while he traveled. Without the leisure time afforded by these mundane service contributions, the production time available to him would have been much more limited.
43. While it does resemble contemporary remix culture, it departs from it in its central aim, which is not to produce a new or inventive creative product through pastiche, but rather to produce a thorough and authoritative product through considered collection and filtering of preexisting knowledge.
44. “Wikipedia: Neutral Point of View.”
45. Collison, Encyclopedias.
46. See Dias, Freedman, Medway, and Par, Worlds Apart; Jones, “From Writers to Information Coordinators”; Slattery, “Textual Coordination”; Reyman, “The Role of Authorship.”
47. Reyman, “The Role of Authorship,” 351.
48. Collison, Encyclopedias, 142.
49. Jones, “From Writers to Information Coordinators.”
50. Jones, From Writers to Information Coordinators, 461.
51. Geisler, “Textual Objects.”
52. Prior and Shipka, “Chronotopic Lamination.”
53. Slattery, “Textual Coordination.”
54. Freedman and Smart, “Navigating the Current of Economic Policy”; Spinuzzi and Zachry, “Genre Ecologies.”
55. Page 143 →See the distributed collaborative work of compiling and creating reference manuscripts that were traditionally performed within monasteries (Trithemius, In Praise of Scribes; Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change).
56. Eyman, “Computer Gaming and Technical Communication”; Luce, “It Wasn’t Intended to Be an Instruction Manual.”
57. Lewis, “CMSs, Bittorrent Trackers, and Large-Scale Rhetorical Genres.”
58. There are far more than three hundred thousand individual user accounts on Wikipedia; at this writing, there are 23,602,552 named users. The number of three hundred thousand refers to the number of editors who have edited Wikipedia more than ten times (Wikipedia: Wikipedians).
59. Campbell, “Agency: Promiscuous and Protean,” 3.
60. Miller, “What Can Automation.”
61. Lundberg and Gunn, “Ouija Board, Are There Any Communications?”
62. D. Davis, Inessential Solidarity, 113.
63. Latour, Pandora’s Hope, 185.

Chapter 2: Crowdfunding Curation

1. Gurak, Cyberliteracy.
2. Kendal is located in Cumbria in northwest England.
3. “Original Biographical Anecdotes,” 671.
4. Ibid.
5. Plomer, A Dictionary of Printers and Booksellers, 19; Rivington, The Publishing Family of Rivington, 22. Rivington documents the Conger of 1742 as including Knapton, Longman, Midwinter, Bettesworth, Pemberton, Rivington, and Ward, among others (77).
6. Two examples of the latter include Bettesworth, who with other partners had published an edition of Mandeville in 1722 (“Wilde,” in Plomer, A Dictionary of Printers and Booksellers), and Rivington, who with Osborn would go on to publish the first edition of Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded in 1741. Rivington later played a central role in convening the New Conger, a publishing consortium that superseded the Conger (“Rivington,” in Plomer, A Dictionary of Printers and Booksellers, 22–23).
7. Hartelius, The Rhetoric of Expertise, 15.
8. Briggs, A History of Longmans.
9. While it is today often commonly referred to as “the first copyright law,” this designation is not entirely correct; the statute was originally intended to break the Stationers’ Guild monopoly. For a foundational account of historical development and issues, see Lyman Ray Patterson’s Copyright in Historical Perspective.
10. Donaldson v. Beckett (1774) 2 Brown’s Parl. Cases 129, 1 Eng. Rep. 837; 4 Burr. 2408, 98 Eng. Rep. 257; 17 Cobbett’s Parl. Hist. 953 (1813).
11. See also Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions, 46–54; Johns, The Nature of the Book, 450–54.
12. Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions, 49.
13. This long-standing connection between the Royal Society and the Grand Lodge was acknowledged by a joint exhibition in 2008.
14. Berman, Foundations of Modern Freemasonry, 38.
15. Chambers includes the Ashmolean in the entry on museums: “The Museum of Oxford, called the Ashmolean Museum, is a noble pile erected at the expense of the University, for the promoting and a carrying on several parts of curious and useful learning,” 605.
16. Berman, Foundations of Modern Freemasonry, 175.
17. Ibid., 34.
18. Clark and Stewart, cited in Berman, Foundations of Modern Freemasonry, 193
19. Ibid., 106.
20. Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment; and Worms, “Senex, John.” Both agree that Senex had been apprenticed to the London bookseller Robert Clavell in 1695 and began publishing through his own house in 1702.
21. Worms, “Senex, John.”
22. Clarke, “The Royal Society”; Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment, 95; Worms, “Senex, John.”
23. Page 144 →Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment, 95.
24. See K. Kennedy, Lamoine, and Révauger, “Ephraim Chambers.”
25. “Harris, John (c. 1666–1719).”
26. Clarke, “The Royal Society.”
27. Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties.” Granovetter noted that weak ties are an important way that communities of strong actors encounter each other.
28. Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment, 96.
29. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change; Kafker, “William Smellie’s Edition”; Schlegel, “Freemasonry and the Encyclopédie Reconsidered”; Shackleton, “The Encyclopédie and Freemasonry.”
30. See Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions, 155–62, for extensive discussion of the influence that Locke’s theories of language had on Chambers’s philosophical development of the Cyclopædia.
31. Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions, 162
32. Other examples include Henry Pemberton’s A View of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy, published in the same year as the Chambers first edition. Voltaire’s Elémens de la Philosophie de Newton, which argued for the universality of Newton’s philosophies, appeared in 1738, the same year as the second edition of the Chambers.
33. Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions.
34. Figure based on Yeo’s description of the 1741 serialization (Encyclopaedic Visions, 52–53). The 1728 serialization may well have been priced differently, but no pricing records survive, to my knowledge.
35. Much of this account of Wikipedia’s very early development is drawn from Sanger, “The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia”; and Lih, The Wikipedia Revolution.
36. Leuf and Cunningham, The Wiki Way, 16.
37. Sanger, “The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia,” 317.
38. “Wikimedia Foundation 2011–12 Annual Report.”
39. All 2013 figures from the Wikimedia Foundation 2012–13 Annual Report. While the totals reported are in U.S. dollars, the report notes that donations were in over eighty-two currencies.
40. “Wikimedia Foundation Annual Report 2008–2009.”
41. “About Us,” Encyclopædia Britannica.com.
42. Gurak, Cyberliteracy.
43. “Wikipedia.”
44. Wales, “[Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia Is an Encyclopedia.”
45. Suber, Open Access, 4.
46. Hartelius, The Rhetoric of Expertise, 27.

Chapter 3: Metaphors of Curation

1. Hawhee, Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw, 42.
2. Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By.
3. Lunsford, “Rhetoric, Feminism, and the Politics of Textual Ownership.”
4. Boyle, “The Second Enclosure Movement”; J. Cohen, “Copyright, Commodification, and Culture”; Lessig, The Future of Ideas.
5. Litman, Digital Copyright; Logie, “A Copyright Cold War?”
6. Lewis, “Piracy Ahoy!”; Logie, Peers, Pirates, and Persuasion; Reyman, The Rhetoric of Intellectual Property.
7. Lunsford, Fishman, and Liew, “College Writing, Identification, and the Production of Intellectual Property.”
8. Behme, “Isocrates on the Ethics of Authorship”; Long, Openness, Secrecy, Authorship.
9. Logie, “I Have No Predecessor.”
10. Rose, Authors and Owners, 28.
11. Milton, “Eikonoklastes,” 329.
12. Defoe, “Miscellanea,” 515–16.
13. Chambers, “Preface,” xxix.
14. Page 145 →The contents of his library were among those sold in the Inn’s courtyard sixteen years after his death. Fortunately the catalogue of sale survived to be archived in the British Library and, later, in the Eighteenth Century Collections Online.
15. Osborne and Shipton, A catalogue of the capital collection.
16. See Liebert, “Apian Imagery and the Critique of Poetic Sweetness in Plato’s Republic.”
17. Yeo, “Ephraim Chambers’ Cyclopædia (1728) and the Tradition of Commonplaces.”
18. Cited in Lechner, Renaissance Concepts of Commonplaces, 141.
19. Virgil, The Aeneid, 6.599.
20. Virgil, Georgics, 4.203–9.
21. Osborne and Shipton, A catalogue of the capital collection, 22, 24.
22. Bacon, “Aphorism XCV,” 392.
23. Both Bacon and Swift’s works were heavily represented in Chambers’s library, which included bound sets of their writings as well as multiple volumes of commentary. Osborne and Shipton, A catalogue of the capital collection, 23, 25, 35, 41, 44, 66, 68, 89, 109, 111, 112.
24. No volume of Aesop is included in the Osborne and Shipton catalogue, but his library did contain a volume of One Hundred and Fifty of Ancient Histories and Fables (46).
25. St. Clair, “Metaphors of Intellectual Property,” 384.
26. My thanks to apiarist Kurt Stavenhagen for his explanation of these transformative steps in the honey-making process.
27. Parikka, Insect Media, 33.
28. Ibid., 44.
29. Ibid., 34.
30. K. Kennedy, “The Daw and the Honeybee.”
31. Rush lights consisted of reeds dipped in tallow. Tallow produces a smoky light and a less pleasant smell; purveyors who sold beeswax adulterated with tallow were tried and sentenced to punishment that included stints in the pillory.
32. Kritskey, “Castle Beekeeping”; Walker and Crane, “English Beekeeping.”
33. It was later revoked in 1684 and restored in 1688. The company retains it to this day.
34. Cox, “A Chronology of the Wax Chandlers History.”
35. Abbot, Sugar, 15; Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery, 13. Chambers included an extensive entry on honey in the 1728 edition that provided an overview of basic bee anatomy and hive culture as well as honey production, usages, and related topics (248). He also included a basic definition for the term apiary (115).
36. Cox, “A Chronology of he Wax Chandlers History.”
37. Wildman, Management of Bees, c.
38. For extensive discussion of the complicated role of gender as both civic metaphor and as instructions for the management of women in the British “bee books,” see Merrick, “Royal Bees.”
39. Crane, The World History of Beekeeping, 407.
40. Ibid.
41. For more on contemporary scientific research on hive social structures, communication, and cognition, see the work of Cornell University biologist Thomas Seeley, particularly his book Honeybee Democracy.
42. For more on the commonwealth itself as a metaphor for intellectual property, see St. Clair, “Metaphors of Intellectual Property.”
43. This was an especially important duty when their caretaker had just died, since the bees need to be told and asked to stay lest they attempt to follow their master. For more on this practice, see Ransome, The Sacred Bee. She explained that custom of “telling the bees” was common not just in Britain but also in central Europe and America (172).
44. Watts, Divine and Moral Songs for Children, 39.
45. W. Butler, The Feminine Monarchie. Butler’s idiosyncratic examination included a musical score that approximated the sound of a hive about to swarm. Daye, The Parliament of Bees.
46. Osbourne and Shipton, A catalogue of the capital collection, 108.
47. Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, 25. The controversy over the book continued for the rest of the century, and successive editions of the text permeated literate society. In 1723 the grand jury of Page 146 →Middlesex “declared the book a public nuisance and [accused] the author . . . of a blasphemy so ‘diabolical’ that it had ‘a direct Tendency to the Subversion of all Religion and Civil Government’” (Bald, Banned Books, 106). Mandeville promptly published a pamphlet containing the jury’s presentment and added it to the next edition of the Fable. It was translated into French in 1740 and into German in 1761, igniting a fresh storm of criticism across the Continent. In his extensive study of Mandeville, E. G. Hundert has pointed out that Adam Smith referred to Mandeville in his 1756 review of Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality for The Edinburgh Review, telling his audience that “whoever reads this . . . work with attention, will observe, that the second volume of The Fable of the Bees has given occasion to the system of Mr. Rousseau.” “Rousseau’s conjectural history of humanity, while strenuously denying The Fable’s conclusions, was perhaps the most influential single text which opening injected Mandeville’s expanded naturalism into the wider Enlightenment debate on the sciences of man,” Hundert wrote. “Within a generation, almost every significant Enlightenment intellectual, from Voltaire to Turgot, Gibbon and Smith had pronounced on the problem of the morally paradoxical nature of material progress” (Hundert, The Enlightenment’s Fable, 59). Smith continued to wrestle with The Fable throughout his life. While he does not reference it directly in The Wealth of Nations, editor Edward Cannan noted a number of places where Smith appears to have been influenced by Mandeville, most particularly in “On The Division of Labour.” Smith revised his attack on Mandeville in The Theory of Moral Sentiments until the end of his life (Hundert, The Enlightenment’s Fable, 16).
48. Horn, Bees in America.
49. St. Clair, “Metaphors of Intellectual Property,” 385.
50. J. Kennedy and Eberhart, Swarm Intelligence, xiv.
51. Ibid., xv.
52. Parikka, Insect Media, 49.
53. Tee for Two, 1945.
54. The Bears and Bees, 1932; Springtime for Pluto, 1944. In later decades a swarm with the collective name “The Bees” would appear in multiple Winnie the Pooh features.
55. The term daikaiju refers to any of the giant monsters that were typical of the kaiju films popularized by the Toho studio and since adopted by many other Japanese studios, as well as a few American ones.
56. “Q Who.”
57. Kelly, “The Electronic Hive,” 76.
58. Reagle, Good Faith Collaboration, 147.
59. Rheingold, Smart Mobs; S. Johnson, Emergence; Shirky, Here Comes Everybody; Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds.
60. Reagle, Good Faith Collaboration, 146.
61. Lanier, “Digital Maoism” and You Are Not a Gadget, 32.
62. Ibid., 143.
63. Mol, “Attacks on Humans”; Queoroz and Magurran, “Safety in Numbers?”
64. Lih, The Wikipedia Revolution, 83.
65. Ibid., 113–14.

Chapter 4: Content Contributors, Vandals, and the Ontology of Curation

1. These mysteries were often difficult to communicate in writing because they involved tacit physical knowledge—for instance what the process of operating an optimally sharpened plane against a particular type of wood should feel like. For a fascinating popular account of mysteries associated with the woodcarving techniques of eighteenth century English artisan Gringling Gibbons and the difficulties of recovering them after the fact, see Esterly, The Lost Carving.
2. See also Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment, 31. While this was remarkable for the times, they still could find it within themselves to extend their egalitarianism only so far: women were never permitted within the English lodges (unlike the French and Swiss lodges), as Jacob and others have written extensively about, and this is a practice that continues to this day. Similarly, bonded men were never accepted.
3. Chambers, Considerations Preparatory, 3–4.
4. Page 147 →Ibid., 4.
5. This would also fit the trend of later editions: Abraham Rees’s enlarged 1778 edition claimed to add forty-four hundred new articles; the index listed a total of fifty-seven thousand articles classed under one hundred heads. Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions, 66.
6. Chambers, Considerations Preparatory, 2.
7. The usual Internet parlance that describes site visitors as “users” has been studiously avoided by the collective from the very beginning. Instead contributors are called “editors.” This small yet welcoming rhetorical move immediately invited contributors to consider themselves a valued part of the system and is still the custom. I adhere to it here.
8. See Ayers, Matthews, and Yates, How Wikipedia Works: “Good articles and Featured articles are two levels of articles that the community has determined to be some of the best content on Wikipedia. . . . Only about 1 in 660 articles [is] listed as good and 1 in 1,200 [is] listed as featured” (227). A formal peer review process is required for articles to receive either status.
9. Wales, “[Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia Is an Encyclopedia.”
10. Priedhorsky, et al., “Creating, Destroying, and Restoring Value in Wikipedia.”
11. A wide range of results are reported on this topic. See N. Cohen, “Define Gender Gap?”; Collier and Bear, “Conflict, Confidence, or Criticism”; Lam et al., “WP:Clubhouse?”; Hill and Shaw, “The Wikipedia Gender Gap Revisited”; “Wikipedia Editors Study.”
12. Simonite, “The Decline of Wikipedia.”
13. Auerbach, “Encylopedia Frown.”
14. Hern, “Wikipedia ‘Edit-a-thon’ Seeks.” In sponsoring the edit-a-thon, the Royal Society is also forced to confront its own historical bias, as it only began admitting women as fellows in 1945.
15. Klein, “Slipping Racism into the Mainstream.”
16. Lih, “Unwanted: New Articles in Wikipedia.”
17. Simonite, “The Decline of Wikipedia.”
18. “Wikipedia: Five Pillars.”
19. Hartelius, The Rhetoric of Expertise.
20. “Wikipedia: Five Pillars.”
21. Ibid.
22. For astute discussion of this issue in the context of academic contributors, see Hartelius, The Rhetoric of Expertise, 150–51.
23. Chappell, “Wikipedia Irks Philip Roth”; Doll, “The Internet Stain”; Gupta, “Philip Roth vs. Wikipedia”; Matyszczyk, “Wikipedia to Philip Roth”; J. Williams, “Philip Roth Goes Public.”
24. Roth, “An Open Letter to Wikipedia.”
25. Sanger, “Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-elitism.”
26. Jemielniak, Common Knowledge?, 151.
27. Wikipedia: “What ‘Ignore All Rules’ Means.”
28. The full exchange (and many others) can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Muhammad/images.
29. Wikipedians consider synthesis to be a subset of original research. “Do not combine material from multiple sources to reach or imply a conclusion not explicitly stated by any of the sources. Similarly, do not combine different parts of one source to reach or imply a conclusion not explicitly stated by the source. If one reliable source says A, and another reliable source says B, do not join A and B together to imply a conclusion C that is not mentioned by either of the sources. This would be a synthesis of published material to imply a new conclusion, which is original research” (“Wikipedia: No Original Research,” emphasis in the original).
30. “Wikipedia: Manual of Style/Images.”
31. “Sign the Petition to Request Wikipedia Editors to Respect Other Peoples’ Religion.”
32. “Conflicting Wikipedia Philosophies.”
33. Userboxes consist of predesigned badges that users embed to display their various affiliations (for example as deletionists or inclusionists), competencies (for example in various languages and at what levels of fluency), interests, and Wikiproject memberships (for example Notability Sorting Drive, Trivia Cleanup). They are commonly displayed along the sider of User pages.
34. Page 148 →Ayers, Matthews, and Yates, How Wikipedia Works, 349.
35. Ibid.
36. Lih, “Unwanted.”
37. Ayers, Matthews, and Yates, How Wikipedia Works, 473.
38. Broughton, Wikipedia: The Missing Manual, 360.
39. “Wikiproject: Inclusion.”
40. “Wikipedia: Notability.”
41. Baker, “The Charms of Wikipedia.”
42. “WikiProject_Inclusion” and “Wikipedia: WikiProject_Deletion.”
43. “Wikipedia: Articles for Deletion: Contributing to AfD Discussions.”
44. Any editor can mark an article for deletion. After the article is tagged, it undergoes a five-day community discussion that provides space for contesting the deletion.
45. For more on self-selection and the Wikipedian community, see Bryant et al., “Becoming Wikipedian.”
46. The social process of creating the necessary consensus to move the project forward is central to Wikipedia, but outside the scope of this study. For more on Wikipedian community dynamics and negotiation, see Bencherki, “Mediators and the Material Stabilization”; Jemielniak, Common Knowledge?; Reagle, Good Faith Collaboration; and Zachry and Morgan, “Negotiating with Angry Mastodons.”
47. Ayers, Matthews, and Yates, How Wikipedia Works, 7.
48. Ibid., 349.
49. “Immediatism.”
50. Ibid.
51. It is possible to have more edits than total words in the article because of vandalism and resulting article reversions.
52. A false article in the 1974 New Columbia Encyclopedia provided a fake biography on one Lillian Virginia Mountweazel, who is described as a mailbox artist (Alford, “Not a Word.”). While this contemporary term did not enter the language until that year, the practice itself is much older.
53. Collison, Encyclopedias, 129–30.
54. See Gordon and Torrey’s 1947 book-length study on the topic, which includes examination of the original proof sheets for the Encyclopédie. Collison suggests that, based on their work, le Breton’s changes represented a levelheaded response to Diderot’s hotheaded tactics (Encyclopedias: Their History, 132).
55. Campbell, “Agency: Promiscuous and Protean,” 7.
56. Viégas et al., “Studying Cooperation and Conflict.”
57. Ibid.
58. Halavais, “The Isuzu Experiment.” Halavais later published a plea that other readers not undertake the same sort of experiment, noting that several more prominent media outlets had also discussed similar experiments around the same time. “To correct an earlier statement: if I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t. There are better, non-destructive ways to check Wikipedia’s accuracy. Please learn from my mistake and do not repeat it,” he wrote (“Please Don’t Do This”).
59. Anderson, “Wendy Davis Supporters”; Brown, “Wendy Davis’ Filibuster”; Burton, “The Internet Celebrates.”

Chapter 5: Production Collectives: Page and Screen

1. Nicotra, “Folksonomy,” 266.
2. Yeo, “A Solution to the Multitude of Books.”
3. While this arrangement was common, it is worth noting that alphabetization was used in English reference texts as early as James le Palmer’s fourteenth-century illuminated encyclopedia Omne Bonum (All Good Things).
4. Comenius, Orbis Pictus.
5. Yeo, “Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopædia (1728).”
6. Chambers, Cyclopædia, xxv.
7. Page 149 →Collison, Encyclopedias, 103.
8. Chambers, Cyclopædia, xxx.
9. See Heilbronner, “Do Machines Make History?”; Licklider and Taylor, “The Computer as a Communications Device”; Pacey, The Culture of Technology; Smith, “Technological Determinism in American Culture.”
10. For more on the social impact of printing technologies, see Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change; Febvre and Martin, The Coming of the Book; Johns, The Nature of the Book; Manguel, A History of Reading; and Ong, Orality and Literacy. For more on the impact of digital texts, see Bolter, Writing Space; Gurak, Cyberliteracy; Levy, Scrolling Forward; and Selber, Multiliteracies for a Digital Age.
11. Johns, The Nature of the Book, 104.
12. Maruca, The Work of Print, 17–18, emphasis in the original.
13. Ibid., 56.
14. This shift in capitalization was not yet widespread, but neither was it entirely uncommon. Jacobson wrote that by 1753, the printer Robert Dodsley had developed “a house style in which, according to Richard Wendorf, . . . he usually replaced Gray’s capitalization of nouns with lower-case letters. . . . Capitalization, even in the case of some personifications, is usually abandoned.” See Jacobson, How Should Poetry Look, 79. The widespread abandonment of Germanic capitalization did not occur until even later in the century. The changes made in the 1738 Cyclopædia precipitate Dodsley’s style by fifteen years, certainly making the text au courant. However, it was not cutting-edge: the long s carries over solidly into the second edition and was in common use until the 1870s, with a few exceptions. Its retention may indicate that the printer was not consumed with being cutting-edge, but rather trying to remain at the comfortable forefront of contemporary typography.
15. Reeves, “Temptation and Its Discontents.”
16. Eco, Magli, and Otis, “Greimassian Semantics and the Encyclopedia,” 718.
17. Wells, The World Brain, 69–74.
18. The Library of Congress had already transferred three million pages of books from the British Library by 1935. See Saffady, Micrographics, 15.
19. Wells, The World Brain, 69.
20. Ibid., 70.
21. Moschovitis et al., History of the Internet, 25.
22. Bush, “As We May Think,” 8.
23. See Nyce and Kahn, From Memex to Hypertext, which contains Bush’s relevant essays along with scholarship on connections between his work and then-current personal computing and information retrieval systems.
24. Nelson, Literary Machines 93.1, n.p.
25. Berners-Lee and Fischetti, Weaving the Web.
26. Moschovitis et al., History of the Internet.
27. Nelson remains widely acknowledged as the inventor of hypertext, although he accepts credit only for coining the phrase in 1965 and making use of the concept: “Hypertext is obvious. I do not claim to have invented hypertext. I merely discovered it. It’s like the telephone. The telephone, at the time, seemed to be an invention. To us, now, it’s a discovery because it’s obvious. Hypertext is like that. To me, it was simply the obvious next step of literature” (quoted in Segaller, Nerds 2.0.1, 287–88).
28. Leuf and Cunningham, The Wiki Way.
29. Cunningham, “Wiki Design Principles.”
30. Hypertextuality enables the intertextual nature of wikis, created when contributors embed a dense series of links within text to other pages within and without the wiki structure, as in Landow’s concept of lexias. See Landow, Hypertext 3.0, 13–22.
31. See Aigrain, “The Individual and the Collective in Open Information Communities”; Bryant et al., “Becoming Wikipedian”; Ciffolilli, “Phantom Authority, Self-Selective Recruitment, and Retention”; Viégas et al., “Studying Cooperation and Conflict.”
32. Leuf and Cunningham, The Wiki Way, 6.
33. Miller, “Expertise and Agency.”
34. Banks, Race, Rhetoric, and Technology.
35. Page 150 →The development of free software whose code can be accessed, modified, and rereleased by anyone with the chops to do so has a long and proud history that grew out of 1970s hacker culture. The free software movement of the 1980s, which demanded the freedom to modify and redistribute free copies of software, eventually gave rise to the Open Source Initiative in the late 1990s. The operating system GNU/Linux became the most prominent example of open-source software supported by a large and distributed development community. Relying heavily on the system tools that originated in Richard Stallman’s GNU Project and the central operating system kernel originally developed by Linus Torvalds, the Linux operating system is the most widely ported OS in the world for both commercial and personal use. Since the central code may be accessed, modified, used, and redistributed by anyone, thousands of coders have contributed to its development since the initial release in 1991. It is hardly the only widely used system that has been built in this collaborative fashion. Other examples include the Apache Server, MySQL database software, and the PHP coding language. Bundled with Linux, these tools form the LAMP Stack, a combination of free, collaboratively developed components that anyone with sufficient skills can use to build a web server without working within the dominant articulation of proprietary software.
For more on the historical development of open source software, see Kelty, “Inventing Copyleft”; and Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture. For careful theorization of the ways that free and open source software are rhetorically positioned as actors within the public sphere, see Benoit-Barné, “Socio-technical Deliberation.”
36. While volunteer efforts have had a considerable positive impact on the site, they have also posed challenges. When initial development began on the MediaWiki, volunteers had root level access to the platform’s infrastructure, which was always live. For a young, agile community, this was a strategic decision: “Our lenient access policy made us flexible, so changes could happen quickly. Also, the sites were smaller, had far fewer users, and large, fundamental changes could be made in production,” wrote technology administrator Ryan Lane (“Opening Our Operations with Wikimedia Labs”). The trouble with development work by nonexperts in a live environment is that innocent mistakes have the potential to lead to considerable systems downtime—something that is unacceptable for an information resource that millions rely on. These inadvertent yet perverse performances of agency were sufficiently significant that administrators made the decision to not grant root access to new volunteers. This secured the system but also created a bottleneck in development since operations were no longer scaled “to meet the needs of a large growth of developers,” reported Lane. “Furthermore, our access policy prevent[ed] volunteer developers from learning how our infrastructure works,” thus further limiting the potential for future volunteer labor as well as the potential for developing collaborative coding and shared expertise.
37. “MediaWiki.”
38. Johnson-Eilola, Datacloud, 51.
39. Ayers, Matthews, and Yates, How Wikipedia Works, 205.
40. “Free But Not Easy,” The Economist.
41. Banks, Race, Rhetoric, and Technology.
42. “Wikimedia Foundation Annual Report 2009–2010.”
43. Orlowski, “Revolting Peasants Force.”
44. “Wikipedia: WikiProject_Military_history.”
45. “WikiProject: Military_History.”
46. “Wikipedia: WikiProject_Categories.”
47. “List of Wikipedias.”
48. “Wikipedia: Page_Curation.”

Chapter 6: Automated Curation

1. Another potential reason that encyclopedias did not include this information was because gazetteers were devoted solely to this sort of specialized information.
2. For a careful consideration of rhetorical aspects of Narrative Science’s algorithms, see J. Brown, Ethical Programs.
3. McMillan, “Robots Now Outnumber Humans on the Web.”
4. Page 151 →Milde, “Can a Computer Be an Author?”
5. T. Butler, “Can a Computer Be an Author?”; Farr, “Copyrightability of Computer-Created Works.”
6. Cowan, Time and Its Measurement.
7. Rosheim, Robot Evolution, 2.
8. LaGrandeur, Androids and Intelligent Networks, 1.
9. See Sawday, The Machine Mind, 193–94.
10. Terpak, “Objects and Contexts,” 269.
11. Chambers, “Androides,” 87.
12. Terpak, “Objects and Context,” 278.
13. For more on this mechanism, see Rosheim, Robot Evolution, 23–27.
14. See Zuboff, In the Age of the Smart Machine.
15. Miller, “Expertise and Agency.”
16. A complete account of Rambot’s development can be found in Lih, The Wikipedia Revolution, 88–106. My summary is drawn from this extended passage.
17. Ibid., 103.
18. “Category: All_Wikipedia_bots.”
19. “User: Rambot.”
20. “User: Rambot/translation.”
21. “User: SineBot.”
22. “Sandboxes” are a common feature of many wiki platforms. They exist to allow the user space to learn and experiment with wiki code. Content is not permanent; Wikipedia sandboxes are wiped every twelve hours.
23. “Wikipedia: Bots.”
24. Lih, The Wikipedia Revolution, 177.
25. Broughton, Wikipedia: The Missing Manual, 161.
26. Propen, Locating Visual Material Rhetorics, 122, 124, 156.
27. “Wikipedia: Bots.”
28. Cordiality is a basic requirement for bot approval. For example ClueBot, which reverts vandalism, leaves this basic message script: “Reverting possible vandalism by [insert name/IP address] to version by [insert name/IP address]. False positive? Report it. Thanks, Cluebot.”
29. J. Johnson, “Sociology of a Door-Closer,” 303.
30. Miller, “Expertise and Agency,” 208.
31. See Foner, “Entertaining Agents”; and Turkle, Life on the Screen, for relevant early case studies.
32. Miller, “Expertise and Agency,” 150–51.
33. Lih, The Wikipedia Revolution, 104.
34. “User: VoABot II.”
35. “Darwin, Minnesota.”

Conclusion

1. Lunsford, “Writing, Technologies, and the Fifth Canon,” 170.

Bibliography

Notes

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Page 139 →Notes

Introduction

Chapter 1: Distributed Curatorial Practices

Chapter 2: Crowdfunding Curation

Chapter 3: Metaphors of Curation

Chapter 4: Content Contributors, Vandals, and the Ontology of Curation

Chapter 5: Production Collectives: Page and Screen

Chapter 6: Automated Curation

Conclusion

Annotate