by Jon Lackman | 14 January 2011 | Americas, Books
Does the traditional encyclopedia — printed on paper, written and edited exclusively by experts — still have a role to play in the age of Wikipedia?
The Grove Encyclopedia of American Art, just published in five hefty volumes, has enormous strengths. It builds on the excellent Grove Encyclopedia of Art (1996), revising and supplementing its many entries on American art. Its well-credentialed contributors have sifted through mounds of scholarship to produce pithy takes on a staggering variety of artists and themes. These are very useful starting points for research, for the high schooler and the academic alike. There is a good variety of black-and-white and color reproductions.
On the negative ledger, such an encyclopedia easily falls out of date and is sometimes hobbled by the partisanship and self-interest of its contributors. The bibliography for the entry on Jackson Pollock, for example, references no post-1989 scholarship except the author’s own.
It is not even certain that expert-written references are more accurate than their crowd-sourced counterparts. Indeed there are regrettable lapses in The Grove Encyclopedia of American Art. For example, the entry on feminism erroneously dates Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document to 1976-80 and states that
After a falling off of activity in the 1980s, there has been a resurgence of activist art in the 1990s, especially in America. Probably the most notable of a host of new organizations are the “Guerrilla Girls.”
This statement leaves the impression that the Guerrilla Girls got their start in the 1990s, when in fact they began in 1985.
I was left wishing that some kind of hybrid of the two types of encyclopedia could be constructed — an online, continuously updated reference that would be curated by experts but would solicit and benefit from the crowd’s corrections and suggestions.
How strange that they have no online component! The description of the new encyclopedia even says they used Grove Art Online as a starting point, but then to not go back to that format in some way seems backwards in 2011, especially for a major reference work like this. I really like your hybrid idea of combing expert and crowd contributions as well. Much more 21st century. More dynamic and sustainable, and as a reference tool, the encyclopedia would even stay relevant longer. In an online case, it would also be nice to see a hybrid of paid and free models to open up some level of access to folks who can’t afford or don’t want an expensive subscription or who don’t have serious art libraries nearby.
Great observations, Jon. It’s difficult to see a future for works like this.
The Iliad is the oldest book in Europe, having lasted thousands of years. With constant transcoding and platform shifts, there is an odd aspect to thinking online is superior to printed texts. Remember the liquid computer in Rollerball that kept losing entire centuries.
There is an online version. Its available on http://www.oxfordartonline.com beginning on January 23rd.
I don’t think critics of print encyclopedias are critics of print in general. But the nature of an encyclopedia (quick access to basic information) is more suited to an online format.