Wikipedia talk:Education program archive/Duke University/WIKIPEDIA AND ITS ANCESTORS: Rethinking Encyclopedic Knowledge in the Digital Age (Spring 2013)/Course description

Course Description

The information overload that characterizes our world compels us to develop a more critical and creative approach to how we manage, collect and share information. Wikipedia is one of the most influential and emblematic ways of gathering information and producing knowledge in the digital age.

But how is Wikipedia any different from traditional encyclopedic projects?

In this class we will explore Wikipedia from the inside out, joining its community as editors rather than simply users. Once we are familiar with its inner workings, we will trace the historical roots of Wikipedia, locating it in the constellation of other Western attempts to achieve universal knowledge. This dual approach will not only make visible the hidden assumptions that drive Wikipedia, but also allow us to rethink the history of encyclopedic knowledge from a contemporary perspective. We will explore Wikipedia and the history of encyclopedias through both traditional and innovative new ways of scholarly inquiry. Through in-class workshops, we will begin to practice methods for text analysis and data visualization currently being developed for use in cutting edge digital humanities scholarship. We will apply these methods to our own studies of digitalized encyclopedias (Diderot and D'Alembert's Encyclopédie) and digital encyclopedias (Wikipedia). Assigned readings will offer a variety of academic approaches to the problem of encyclopedic knowledge, from philosophies of information to intellectual history, the sociology of science, and semiotics. Through visits to the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, we will examine historical editions of encyclopedias and consider how these books might have functioned as tangible objects in past centuries.

Required Texts

• Ayers, Phoebe, Charles Matthews, and Ben Yates. How Wikipedia Works: And How You Can Be a Part of It. San Francisco: No Starch Press, 2008.
• Blair, Ann. Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010.

• D’Alembert, Jean L. R, Richard N. Schwab, and Walter E. Rex. Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

• Surowiecki, James. The wisdom of Crowds. New York: Anchor Books, 2005.

(All other readings are available on Sakai)

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