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Textual Curation: Authorship, Agency, and Technology in Wikipedia and Chambers’s Cyclopædia

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