The networked life of professional encyclopaedias : Quantification, tradition, and trustworthiness by Olof Sundin and Jutta Haider

• This paper aims at making visible new orders of encyclopaedic knowledge by means of an ethnographic study carried out during eight months at the editorial office of the leading commercial encyclopaedia in Sweden, Nationalencyklopedin (NE). The investigation is framed in a socio-technical understanding of how people, technologies and practices relate to each other. Three themes were identified during the analysis: Organisation of labour amongst the editors, the use of statistics, and the contrast between NE as a producer of facts and NE as a producer of analysis. The analysis revolves around the ambivalence, uncertainty, sometimes even friction, between traditional encyclopaedic knowledge and network culture. The often routine-based practices of updating articles meet ideas of project work, of open data, of algorithms and most of all of quantification. © rst Monday, 1995-2013.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap -- Biblioteks- och informationsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Media and Communications -- Information Studies (hsv//eng)

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

art (ämneskategori)