The Open Access Anthropology Journal Ticker

The launch and rapid domination of Wikipedia as a reference tool for the Internet was as dramatic as it was unexpected. Wikipedia broke so many of the rules of reference publishing, which, even if not formally codified, had been widely accepted for man…

Above my desk is a quote by Albert Einstein: “Do not worry about your difficulties in mathematics; I can assure you that mine are still greater.” One of Einstein’s problems, of course, was that since he was a pioneer, there were not many who could give…

Mnopedia is the recently created, born digital encyclopedia of the state of Minnesota. It is a project of the Minnesota Historical Society (MNHS), the state’s leading cultural heritage institution and one of the largest and oldest historical societies …

Wikipedia is often held up as an example of the potential of the internet to foster open, free and non-commercial collaboration. However such discourses often conflate these values without recognising how they play out in reality in a peer-production c…

No abstract available.

With this article I intend to contribute to the debate about how to study urban life. Firstly, I argue for the relevance of invisible and silent aspects of cities and inbetween sutures, which I understand to mean a third ’something’ beyond forms and fl…

This article departs from the huge art-curating project Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A., 1945–1980, a Getty funded initiative running in Southern California from October 2011 to April 2012 with a collaboration of more than sixty cultural institution…

How knowledge is negotiated between the makers of encyclopedias and their audiences remains an ongoing question in research on encyclopedias. A comparative content analysis of the published answers of letters to the editor of the German Meyers Konversa…

As traditional encyclopaedias appear to be loosing the favour of the general public, the current paper investigates the extent to which encyclopaedias are still presented as authoritative texts. Here, authority in texts is mostly construed from the the…

Encyclopedias present and contain knowledge, but historically they have also been commercial commodities, produced for sale. In this article, we study the self-presentations of a selection of Norwegian encyclopedias, as these are expressed in the form …

Information increasingly flows from smart online knowledge systems, based on ‘collective intelligence’, and to the more traditional form of knowledge production that takes place within academia. Looking specifically at the case of Wikipedia, and at how…

The death of the encyclopaedia is increasingly reported in connection with the abandonment of hard copy reference publishing, the dispersal of library reference collections and the preference for end-users to seek information from search engines and so…

Through the integrated framework of participation theory and political economy, this article analyzes participatory opportunities in the virtual world Habbo Hotel, and how participation is constrained and framed by the producer’s commercial strategies,…

Store norske leksikon (SNL) [Great Norwegian Encyclopaedia] is an edited, online encyclopaedia that strives towards radical transparency. Our aim is for as many parts of text production as possible to be visible to everyone, much like in the model that…

Though digital media have unquestionably affected the features and functions of modern encyclopedias, such works also continue to be shaped by factors thoroughly conventional by the end of the historical Enlightenment. As William Smellie, editor of the…