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Textual Curation: Authorship, Agency, and Technology in Wikipedia and Chambers’s Cyclopædia
Quarterly Journal of Speech ( IF 1.3 ) Pub Date : 2020-01-02 , DOI: 10.1080/00335630.2020.1709733
Pamela VanHaitsma 1
Affiliation  

Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopædia: or, an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (1728) offered readers a “taxonomy of knowledge” that lists rhetoric as one of the “forty-seven major areas of the sciences and arts,” categorizing it as a “symbolic” art (98–99). Chambers’s encyclopedic project innovated, however, in that its own information infrastructure was ordered not thematically, according to such taxonomies common in the early eighteenth century, but aphetically, within a curated network of cross-indexed information. In the networked, hyperlinked encyclopedic project best known in our own time, Wikipedia, the current entry for rhetoric also characterizes it as an art, predictably recounting Western rhetoric’s own familiar taxonomies and lists. Yet in examining “revision history statistics” for the entry, we locate other, perhaps less expected forms of information: we find the page was revised 2641 times between November 2011 and July 2017 by no fewer than 1491 human editors and bots. Such are the curiosities with respect to rhetoric, information, and authorship that Kennedy’s study of both encyclopedias invites readers to contemplate. Kennedy’s project is “a comparative, historical study of authorship and rhetorical agency,” investigating how Wikipedia and Cyclopædia “have... explicitly challenged common viewpoints on writers, composing processes, and textual projects” (3). While readers will know that Wikipedia is collectively authored in ways made possible by digital technologies, Kennedy’s analysis helps us to see the full texture of this collaboration and understand its significance in rhetorical, social, and technological terms. We also learn that questions of collective authorship, particularly in the case of encyclopedias attempting to curate vast amounts of knowledge, were in play long before the advent of the world’s largest online encyclopedia. While Chambers’s Cyclopædia was a product of the Enlightenment, as Kennedy carefully describes, here too the curatorial labor was shared by many, responsive to perceptions of information overload, and shaped by the available technologies. Ultimately, through comparison of these encyclopedias, Kennedy rethinks both what counts as writing and who (or what) writes. A key contribution of Kennedy’s book is her robust rhetorical theory of curation as a form of writing. Recognizing the ubiquity of “curation” as a vernacular and scholarly term, Kennedy’s definitional work is informed especially by the interdisciplinary fields of museum studies and library science, with their interests in the collection, arrangement, and preservation of information (5). Emphasizing the rhetorical dimensions of what she terms “textual curation,” Kennedy defines it as “a category of compositional craft” that requires “a rhetorical, dynamic skill set” including “filtration, recomposition, and composing for findability and navigation” (7, 28). Such recompositon may be understood as “derivative,” as it involves laboring with others’ writing (e.g., creating metadata for an existing Wikipedia page or developing crossreferences between Cyclopædia entries) (28). Its invention may occur largely through arrangement (16). And its texts may be “small or invisible” (8). But, as Kennedy persuasively argues, the compositional and rhetorical labor of textual curation does amount to writing. Working with this conception of curatorial writing, Kennedy advances a view of authorship and rhetorical agency as distributed across human and non-human practices. Here she is in

中文翻译:

文本管理:维基百科和钱伯斯百科全书中的作者、代理和技术

Ephraim Chambers 的 Cyclopædia: or, an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (1728) 为读者提供了“知识分类法”,将修辞列为“科学和艺术的 47 个主要领域”之一,将其归类为“象征”艺术(98-99)。然而,钱伯斯的百科全书式项目的创新之处在于,它自己的信息基础设施不是按照 18 世纪早期常见的分类法按主题排序,而是在交叉索引信息的策划网络内进行排序。在我们这个时代最著名的网络化、超链接的百科全书项目维基百科中,修辞学的当前条目也将其描述为一种艺术,可以预见地叙述西方修辞学自己熟悉的分类法和列表。然而,在检查条目的“修订历史统计数据”时,我们发现了其他,可能不是预期的信息形式:我们发现该页面在 2011 年 11 月至 2017 年 7 月期间被不少于 1491 名人工编辑和机器人修改了 2641 次。这就是肯尼迪对这两本百科全书的研究邀请读者思考的关于修辞、信息和作者身份的好奇心。Kennedy 的项目是“对作者身份和修辞机构的比较、历史研究”,调查维基百科和 Cyclopædia 如何“明确挑战关于作家、创作过程和文本项目的共同观点”(3)。虽然读者会知道维基百科是以数字技术为可能的方式集体创作的,但肯尼迪的分析帮助我们了解这种合作的完整结构,并理解其在修辞、社会和技术方面的重要性。我们还了解到集体作者问题,特别是在试图管理大量知识的百科全书的情况下,早在世界上最大的在线百科全书出现之前就已经存在。虽然钱伯斯的《百科全书》是启蒙运动的产物,正如肯尼迪仔细描述的那样,这里的策展工作也由许多人共同承担,对信息过载的看法做出反应,并受到可用技术的影响。最终,通过比较这些百科全书,肯尼迪重新思考什么是写作以及谁(或什么)写作。肯尼迪这本书的一个关键贡献是她将策展作为一种写作形式的强大修辞理论。认识到“策展”作为一个白话和学术术语无处不在,Kennedy 的定义性工作尤其受到博物馆研究和图书馆学的跨学科领域的启发,他们对信息的收集、整理和保存感兴趣 (5)。肯尼迪强调她所说的“文本策展”的修辞维度,将其定义为“一种组合工艺”,需要“修辞的、动态的技能组合”,包括“过滤、重组和为可查找性和导航而作曲”(7, 28)。这种重新组合可以被理解为“衍生”,因为它涉及与他人的写作合作(例如,为现有的维基百科页面创建元数据或开发 Cyclopædia 条目之间的交叉引用)(28)。它的发明可以主要通过装置(16)发生。它的文本可能是“小或不可见的”(8)。但是,正如肯尼迪有说服力地论证的那样,文本策展的构图和修辞工作确实相当于写作。肯尼迪以这种策展写作的概念提出了一种观点,即作者和修辞机构分布在人类和非人类实践中。她在这里
更新日期:2020-01-02
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