Encyclopedias by Amanda Klassen

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In this presentation, the encyclopedia is examined using the Mcluhan tetrad to situate it within its historical and technological context.  The history is unpacked further by outlining its history from antiquity to present day and how the technology, access, authorship, and validation has changed along with this history. Finally, rounding off the presentation, I end with a short curated list of resources for further information on the history of encyclopedias.

While the history of encyclopedias was a new topic to me, I cannot say I found it surprising as it is similar to other text-based technologies. One of the things that fascinates me is how its history oscillates between stringent content validation and less authoritative reviews. For example, some of the criticisms of Wikipedia are similar to the pre-Enlightenment era encyclopedia. The pre-Enlightenment era encyclopedia was criticized for its religious authority leanings in much the same way as Wikipedia is criticized as non-academic and unverified content. It will be interesting to see the next iteration of the encyclopedic technology and how it treats sourcing of content–my guess is a more sophisticated system of validating information via Artificial Intelligence.