Knowledge and Meaning in the Information Age
A Humanist Perspective on Wikipedia
Over the past decade, Wikipedia has drawn together a community of volunteer editors, translators, and programmers who have created the largest encyclopedia in history and one of the ten most visited websites in the world. But, while Wikipedia was born online, many of the ideas that inform its composition have long histories. Human beings have strived to give order to knowledge in the face of worries about information overload for ages. Their various responses have been shaped by the cultural norms, social needs, and technological possibilities of their historical contexts. This talk will focus on the old media precedents for Wikipedia’s new media success story to explore what reciprocal relationships they reveal between concepts like knowledge and information and the technologies we design to build and distribute them.
Speaker Bios
Melanie Kill is an assistant professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her scholarship is in rhetorical genre theory, digital rhetorics, and critical discourse analysis, with specific interests in genre change in new media, the concept of uptake, and innovative rhetorics. She is currently at work on a book entitled, The Last Encyclopedia: Wikipedia and the Networking of Human Knowledge. Follow Dr. Kill on Twitter @mkkill.
Media
A continuously updated schedule of talks is also available on the Digital Dialogues page.
Unable to attend the events in person? Archived podcasts can be found on the MITH website, and you can follow our Digital Dialogues Twitter account @digdialog as well as the Twitter hashtag #mithdd to keep up with live tweets from our sessions. Viewers can watch the live stream as well.
All talks free and open to the public. Attendees are welcome to bring their own lunches.
Contact: MITH (mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 301.405.8927).