Page xiii →Acknowledgments

As is appropriate for a book on distributed composing practices, this work is the product of many conversations and many voices. Hundreds of textual curators, both known and unknown, contributed to the texts studied here. I am grateful that they devoted time, expertise, energy, and funding to encyclopedia building and to creating publicly available resources. Ephraim Chambers took great care in his considerations of curating encyclopedic projects and yet managed to include flashes of his own unique perspective and wit within technical texts. Nearly three hundred years after the first edition, it is still a pleasure to study his books.

This project began as a dissertation, and I am grateful to readers at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, who encouraged my work: Laura Gurak, John Logie, Richard Graff, and Michael Hancher. Thanks are owed to all my colleagues in the Department of Writing Studies, Rhetoric, and Composition at Syracuse University, most especially my research mentor, Lois Agnew, and Rebecca Moore Howard, both of whom provided extensive feedback, as well as Collin Brooke, Eileen Schell, and Steve Parks. I am thankful for the time and energy they devoted to reading drafts and proposals, offering advice, and creating an amazingly collegial place to work. The College of Arts and Sciences at Syracuse University generously supported research and production for this study, and Deans George Langford and Karin Ruhlandt supported release time to complete the manuscript.

Students in my graduate seminars on Authorship and Rhetorics of Craft in the Syracuse University Composition and Cultural Rhetorics Program provided helpful contemplation and feedback. Jana Rosinski and Justin Lewis were always good for intensive discussions on nonhuman agency, rhetorical invention, and information structures. Seth Long has been an outstanding research assistant with an incredible eye for detail. His thinking on data analysis and visualization has enriched my own. Kurt Stavenhagen, our program’s resident beekeeper, generously shared his extensive knowledge on honeybees and apiaries. Communication and Rhetorical Studies graduate student Albert Rintrona enthusiastically shared his expertise on Japanese language and culture.

Page xiv →This research would not be possible without the knowledge and skill of a number of librarians, special collections specialists, and archivists. Patrick Williams, our departmental liaison librarian at Syracuse University’s Bird Library, was immensely helpful. In London Susan Snell and Martin Cherry at the United Grand Lodge of England archives went out of their way to make me feel welcome and to direct my attention to rare resources. I also benefited from the expertise of Andrew Mussell at Gray’s Inn, Naomi van Loo at the New College of Oxford University, Joanna Corden at the Royal Society, and the brilliant desk librarians at the Bodleian Special Collections and Lower Reserve Reading Rooms as well as at the British Library. The Royal Society of London’s Sackler Foundation Archive of biographical data has been a vital resource for tracing information on the subscribers who supported the Cyclopædia’s 1728 edition. The James Ford Bell Library at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, provided access to a rare hard copy of the Cyclopædia, and I also relied on open-access, searchable editions produced by the University of Wisconsin–Madison Digital Collections’ History of Science and Technology Collection and by the Project for American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language (ARTFL) at the University of Chicago’s Division of the Humanities.

For professional encouragement and inspiration, I thank Jonathan Alexander, Joshua Gunn, Debra Hawhee, Michelle Kennerly, Andrea Lunsford, Michael Neal, Kendall Phillips, Andrew Pink, Scott Rogers, and Brad Vivian. Thanks also to my many friends and colleagues who enthusiastically discussed swarms in popular culture and recommended relevant media artifacts. I am grateful to Kristine Blair, Cécile Révauger, Kelly Ritter, Michelle Smith, and Barbara Warnick for publishing early versions of some of this research. The National Council of Teachers of English granted permission to reprint in chapter 2 much of my article “The Bee and the Daw: Situating Metaphors for Originality and Authorial Labor in the 1728 Chambers’s Cyclopædia,” which appears in College English 76.1 (2013): 35–58. Waveland Press in Long Grove, Illinois, granted permission to reprint in chapter 6 portions of “Textual Machinery: Authorial Agency and Bot-Written Texts in Wikipedia,” which appeared in The Responsibilities of Rhetoric (2009), 303–9. Aspects of this research also appear in an article entitled “Textual Curation,” published in Computers and Composition 40 (June 2016): 175-189. They are reprinted here by kind permission of Elsevier..

The University of South Carolina Press and its staff have been absolutely outstanding to work with. I am grateful to Thomas Benson for his support of this project. Thanks are also especially offered to Jim Denton, Linda Fogle, Suzanne Axland, and Elizabeth Jones for their unfailing collegiality, patience, and ability to keep the trains running on time. Two anonymous reviewers of the book Page xv →manuscript offered extensive suggestions that have significantly improved it, and I am indebted for their time and consideration.

Here in the Syracuse University Writing Department, George Rhinehart has provided invaluable technological assistance and made me laugh constantly. He, Kristi Johnson, and the rest of our remarkable staff have offered tremendous help with navigating the pragmatic details of daily academic business. Janine Jarvis, Kristen Krause, Martha Love, Chris Palmer, LouAnn Payne, Faith Plvan, and Beth Wagner, you are the best at what you do.

The University of Minnesota’s Ph.D. Program in Rhetoric and Scientific and Technical Communication on the St. Paul campus fostered a remarkable community. Paul Anheier, Anthony Arrigo, T. Kenny Fountain, Marnie Gamble, Dave Kmiec, Zoe Nyssa, Merry Rendahl, and Erin Wais-Hennen, I am thinking of you. In particular Dawn Armfield, Amy Propen, and Jessica Reyman can always be counted on for incredible encouragement and challenging discussions on authorship, agency, technology, and digital texts. I especially thank Greg Schneider-Bateman, who has been my writing partner and one of my closest friends for the past decade. Also in Minneapolis Francesca Davis DiPiazza has been a soul sister and fellow writer. Here in Syracuse, Minnie Bruce Pratt and Leslie Feinberg were unfailing sources of wit, curiosity, and good cheer, as were Jenny, Lisa, and Squirt Spadafora in Boston. In London, Rachel Rawlins and Joanna O’Connell taught me the city and shared wise conversation right up until the moment the Tube stopped running in the evenings. Any errors in that remain in this project are, of course, entirely my own.

My parents, Cheryl and Jimmy Kennedy, have always been champions of the possible. Growing up around their technical manuals, tools, typewriters, and dictionaries did much to shape my research interests and relationship to work. Clio and Thalia Kennedy-Ward have been patient, hilarious writing companions who remind me that it is a good idea to step away from the keyboard on a regular basis.

And most important, my undying gratitude to Jeff Ward, who has kept me sane, fed, and laughing since we first met in the University of Arkansas at Little Rock’s MA Program in Professional and Technical Writing. In addition to reading and commenting on every page of this manuscript, he’s reminded me to go outside, to plant things in the garden, and to get in the car and take a look at the gorgeousness that is New York State. His intellectual companionship makes for lively dinner conversation and expands my thought in ways that I do not always see coming. And his faith in me simply keeps me going. No words will ever be enough to repay his unfailing understanding, patience, humor, and love. The simplest, best words will have to do: thank you, and I love you.