So let us go on and examine for a moment how encyclopaedic works of any kind may come to be constituted as "authoritative". What might we mean when we choose to refer to some token of an encyclopaedia as an "authoritative" work? In Collin's COBUILD English Dictionary "authoritative" is defined as follows:
"authoritative /O:QÅr'.t'tiv/
1. Someone or something that is authoritative gives an impression of power and importance and is likely to be obeyed. EG ...a deep authoritative male voice... The name was written in large authoritative letters.
* authoritatively, EG "Don't do that," he said authoritatively.
2. A person, book etc. that is authoritative has or shows a lot of knowledge or understanding of a particular subject. EG This is the most authoritative study of the subject."
There are then two main connotations or senses attributed to the word "authoritative" which seem to correlate "power and importance" with large amounts of knowledge or understanding of particular subjects. We shall not comment further on the particular choice of gender in the first example given for definition 1 and the one given for "authoritatively", although this might reflect some important sociocultural realities with regard to the ways in which authority and power is distributed across genders. Neither shall we discuss the implied relationship between loudness of voice and largeness of written characters as expressions of power and authority in the examples given above for the first definition, which nonetheless may give us cause for reflection[1] . Definition 2 seems then, to be the most useful one for our present purposes. In order to encompass the conventional encyclopaedia, however, this definition will obviously need to be extended [i.e. beyond the range of "a particular subject"] in order to cover the wide range of topic areas and subjects that such works try to encompass, albeit at a "global", and subsequently a fairly superficial level of treatment due to various sets of spatial and temporal constraints implicit in the collocation and publication process.
One pragmatic criterion for this kind of authority may be the perceived "completeness" or "completeness" of an encyclopaedia as a token of the genre "reference work". That is, whether it as a text or genre token not only satisfies the condition of providing sufficient quantities and depth of knowledge and information for the potential requirements and needs of a postulated model reader, but also whether this information is organised in such a way as to make access to this information easy for the empirical reader. Another criterion for such authority may be tied in with the idea of the "openness" or "closedness" of the encyclopaedia considered as a cultural artefact, which relates amongst other things to its particular representational mode and style [see below].
In the case of a conventional encyclopaedia which is considered authoritative there might also be some expectations that it will in some way constrain the development of multiple interpretations of its content by potential readers. Generally speaking, works endowed with a strong culturally constituted authority are associated with limitations on the number and nature of possible interpretations [see Eco's discussion of this in relation to possible readings of the Scriptures in the Middle Ages in The Role of the Reader [Eco 1987, pp 50-52]]. Another aspect of an encylopaedia's openness or closedness might be the extent to which [and in which ways] it incorporates pointers from its own "center of authority" to other "authoritative" texts [or even more interestingly, to other more "peripheral" works which may well be relevant for readers, but which generally will not be integrated in full into the work itself because the editors have to work within certain sets of cultural, technological, spatial and temporal constraints.] We shall discuss how such constraints may be operative during the collocation and publishing process later on.
In his essay The Poetics of the Open Work [Eco 1987 [1981], pp 47-66] Umberto Eco discusses the notions of "completeness" and "openness" in relation to works of art. He points out that both these expressions refer to a standard situation of which we are all aware in our reception of a work of art: we tend to see it as the end-product of an author's attempt to arrange a sequence of communicative effects in such a way that each individual addressee can refashion the original composition devised by the author. The addressee is bound to enter into an interplay of stimulus and response which depends on his unique capacity for reception of the piece. In this sense the author presents a finished product with the intention that the this particular composition should be appreciated and received in the same form that he devised it. A work of art is therefore "a complete and closed form in its uniqueness as a balanced organic whole, while at the same time constituting an open product on account of its susceptibility to countless different interpretations which do not impinge upon its unadulterated specificity. Hence every reception of a work of art is both an interpretation and a performance of it, because in every reception the work takes on a fresh perspective." [pp 48-50].
The same considerations as regards openness for refashioning of content by the reader, completeness or closedness, as well as the above-mentioned bifurcation of reception into "interpretation" and "performance" can usefully be applied in a discussion of conventional encyclopaedias. Reading an encyclopaedia, the reader will not only draw on the text as it presents itself for his or her interpretation of it, but also during his or her own "performance" of reading the work contribute interpretants that have originated in interactions with signs produced by other forms of media that may provide more "on-line" groundings for his or her interpretation of what is being read. These media may be the local and international press and media, as well as the reader's own day-to-day involvement in culturally constituted discourses in his or her immediate environment. In phenomenological terms the ground of the reader's life-world is constantly changing relative to some wider horizon of culture and nature.
Encyclopaedias designed and implemented as hypermedia systems with an implicitly and explicitly realised navigational architecture [a so-called "hyperstructure"] would seem to be open to an even greater degree than conventional encyclopaedias since they invite the reader to create their own readings and interpretations of content elements as they "navigate" interactively through links that structure the work. A hypermedia system consists essentially of a distributed database containing a large number of "nodes", each of which might for example represent different types or domains of knowledge. Each node is seen as a concentration or clustering of [semantically, or perhaps functionally] categorised information elements encoded digitally as different media types [texts, images, sound-bites, video-clips, animation and graphics]. Hyperstructures are generally supposedly designed so as to allow easy navigation through very large amounts of information by offering the reader access to a number of [pre]programmed "links" between various types of informational elements or "texts". In advanced hypermedia systems it is also theoretically possible for the user to make "free" searches through the information stored in the database so long as special tools for this purpose are integrated into the system.
The sequence of communicative effects designed into this kind of work will in fact tend to "guide" the reader in his or her readings in rather different ways than a more traditional encyclopaedia where the reader can choose to dip into the content from any possible point on taking it down from the shelf. In practice, however, the user of a conventional work such as Encyclopaedia Britannica will often utilise the alphabetical key-word registers and other organisational and referential subsidiary works such as the Propædia and Macropædia as entry points to the greater mass of information in the main encyclopaedia.
Nonetheless, the fact still remains that any kind of encyclopaedic reference work, "open" as they often may seem to be at first glance, are to quite a high degree "completed" and "closed" too, in the sense that they are first of all compiled [as a "product"] by some community of authors and editors whose presuppositions about, and perceptions of who the potential readership of the work are, and whose own textual norm systems [Berge 1993, 1994] implicitly frame and determine the selection and structuring of content elements, and the genres of presentation that characterise the completed work as an organic whole. Secondly, there are similar types of considerations involved here with regard to the ways in which the editors and programmers [pre]select key-words in terms of types and tokens that can be used to act as anchor points for creating links between the various information "nodes" that comprise the system.
Any pre-programming or organisation of links of this kind in any kind of "completed" product - be it a conventional paper encyclopaedia, or a multimedia encyclopaedia on a CD-ROM - requires in practice that many predetermined categorisational and organisational choices have to be made [at many different levels of systemic representation] with regard not only to which key-words, images or other kinds of semiotic tokens embedded in the various documents should act as "anchors", pointing to other works, documents, graphics and images; and in the case of the multimedia encyclopaedia, to sound-bites, animations and video-clips that have been imported into the system. The same considerations apply with regard to the functionality of the links, i.e. the specific ways in which these links are designed to function.
In hypermedia encyclopaedias with "free search" capabilities, the nature of the algorithms that constitute the search tools integrated in the system working in conjunction with the various levels of systemic choices mentioned above will amongst other things determine which degree of delicacy of description or stratification [see Halliday & Mathiessen in press] of the knowledge base the user of the system will have access to and be able to utilise during his or her interactive "open" searches of the total unity of information made available by the system. It thus is not possible to see such a system as structure-free or "open", so long as it is designed as a "completed" work and presented as such [for example on a CD-ROM] by the developers. Decisions made during the design and publication process will ultimately always affect the reader's navigational process while accessing the work, and thus which "readings" are in fact made possible. Some navigational paths might for instance be more clearly marked than others. There is thus some kind of deeper relationship between the very [meta]structure of the system and the kinds of interpretations and understandings of the content matter that it facilitates and allows.
Roland Posner [in press] claims that the concept of "medium" needs to be re-examined in the light of the ways in which modern media affect communication processes. We need to begin to look upon media as sets of constraints, he says. Now, this idea of constraints is not necessarily a negative one, but rather an attempt to understand which types of presentation and production processes in fact belong to the various types of mass media as we know them today. To some extent these constraints are tied to the specific channel of communication that the medium uses, and thus to the technology or hardware that makes possible and maintains this. But constraints in this connection can also be socially or culturally constituted. This is rather important to remember. Certainly new technology sets its own sets of constraints for how new mediums of expression determine the self same sign processes that they facilitate, but just as often it is the received canon of textual and interactional norms currently prevalent in the social fields that constitute various cultural domains which influence the ways in which the potential of new media technologies becomes realised and interpreted in that particular culture.
A medium involves many more things than the channel of communication itself, genres of production and presentation etc., it also involves auxiliary sign processes which it requires and makes possible. Cinema involves for instance the production and distribution of a film to be performed. Theatre and concerts involve the creation of scripts and scores, as well as rehearsals and program production and distribution to announce the event. Radio and television involve the reservation and use of studios for live productions and recordings, as well as radio and television networks for transmission, and the receivers that consumers use to witness the performances. Telephony involves telecommunication networks and the companies that maintain and run these etc. If we consider the encyclopaedic genre of reference work as a type of medium for communicating and disseminating knowledge, we have to consider it not only as text, but also in relation to the socioculturally and technologically mediated processes involved in its production and distribution. We also need to examine how the revision of existing encyclopaedic reference works is incorporated into these processes and mediated through the encyclopaedia as a cultural artefact.
Revision of conventional encyclopaedias in the form of new published editions generally involves the removal of some set of content items of knowledge which are considered no longer current, but it consists mainly of the addition of others which are seen to constitute "new" knowledge to the common pool of knowledge or meanings which the work represents. This then is basically a process of pruning, collocation and extension carried on around, and in relation to, the basic "core" or canon of accepted knowledge, which are materially represented by the institutional archives of the publishing house in question and those of its associated contact network of informants around the world.
We can get some idea of how these kinds of understandings are reflected and presented textually in the preface of one of the first large modern Norwegian "conversational lexicons" [Gyldendals Store Konversasjonsleksikon], which was originally published in Norway in 1938. The second edition of this work was published in the early 1960's. In the preface to the second edition, the editors cite the mission which was articulated as below in the original 1938 edition:
"Redaksjonen av Gyldendals store konversasjonsleksikon har hatt som mål å skape et nyttig og greit bruksverk for de tusen hjem. Derfor har den, uten å forsømme noe emne av mer faglig betonet art, lagt vekt på et rikt stoff av almen interesse. I overenstemmelse med dette ønske er det innført tusener av oppslagsord som ikke er å finne i noen av de eldre leksika, men som vi tror vil være til stor nytte for mange."
["The editors of Gyldendal's Large Conversational Lexicon have had it as their goal to create a useful and easy to use work for the thousand homes. Therefore we have, without neglecting any topic of a more specialist kind, concentrated ourselves on providing a rich content of general interest. In accordance with this wish we have introduced thousands of reference words which cannot be found in any of the older lexica, but which we believe will be of interest for many." [My translation from Norwegian. Emphasis is also mine.]
The authoritativeness of the work is further documented by the list of contributing authors, where each is represented with a full professional title; her we find amongst others university professors, senior public servants, doctors, lawyers and leading figures from industry. The editors then go on to explicate the process of producing the 1965 edition in the following way:
"Verkets omfang har øket, men som førsteutgaven er også denne utgaven trykt i løpet av noen få måneder, under medvirkning av flere store trykkerier, for å sikre den størst mulige samtidighet og overenstemmelse i fremstillingen gjennom alle verkets bind. Allikevel har jo ikke verden stått stille i disse måneder heller, og opplysninger om dødsfall og andre viktige hendelser som er inntruffet under trykningen, etterat hovedartikkelen om emnet var passert, vil finnes som et tillegg i siste bind."
["The size of the work has increased, but like the first edition this edition has also been printed in the course of just a few months, with the assistance of several large printers, in order to assure the greatest degree possible of currency and correctness of presentation throughout all volumes of the work. The world, however, has not stood still during these months either, and details of deaths and other important events which have occurred during printing, and after the main article on that particular theme was completed, will be found as an appendix in the last volume."]
So here the claim to authority is closely and explicitly tied in with the basic process of information collocation, selection and publishing, where criteria such as currency, and correctness of presentation across subsequent volumes is central. This leads to the need for the appendix in order to document the seriousness of the editors' attempts to maintain and actualise these qualitative criteria as far as possible into the very heart of the publishing process.
When the editors of the Norwegian Gyldendal's Encyclopaedia state there that they: "... have had it as their goal to create a useful and easy to use work for the thousand homes", they are referring indirectly to a pre-publishing process of discussion and planning which is both embedded in, and contingent upon, their own culture-specific perspectives on how knowledge and an identity as "knower" are created that are prevalent in their own culture, which is where, and in relation to which, this particular work has been created, legitimised and distributed. These perspectives are actualised in Norwegian culture (as they are in all other cultures) as specific sets of textual norm systems and genres of expression and production. The expression "the thousand homes" ["de tusne hjem"] is for example a quite powerful and evocative metaphor within Norwegian social-democratic culture. It has connections to a similar expression from Sweden, namely "folkehjemmet" - "the home of the people", and in the case of the Norwegian expression, it is also part of a line at the beginning of the Norwegian national anthem:
"Ja vi elsker dette landet/ som det stiger frem/furet, værbitt over vannet/ med de tusne hjem".
[Yes we love this land of ours/ as it issues forth/ furrowed, weathered from the waters/ with the thousand homes]
This idea of "de tusne hjem" encapsulates the national ideal of the nation-state of free individuals, and the editors of the encyclopaedia acknowledge their responsibility to this ideal in the way in which they choose to present and legitimise this family encyclopaedia for the home market. This represents a situating of the knowledge contained in the work in a more "localised" cultural context of situation, and as such involved a translation of globally constituted knowledge into the terms and genres applicable within this set of culturally constituted norm-systems.
Let us now go on for a moment and look at one more recent, more internationally or globally oriented reference work in terms of cultural, mediational, technological and other constraints, namely the Encyclopaedia Britannica Book of the Year for 1988. This is one of the yearly issued collections of new information which are designed to supplement and update the Encyclopaedia Britannica Macropædia. The Macropædia is itself a minor collection of thematic articles that refer to the core Encyclopaedia Britannica. In the introduction to the section entitled "Major Revisions from the 1988 Macropædia" the editors state that:
"The purpose of this section is to introduce to continuing Book of the Year subscribers selected Macropædia articles or portions of them that have been completely revised or written anew. It is intended to update the Macropædia in ways that cannot be accomplished fully by reviewing the year's events or by revising statistics annually, because the Macropædia texts themselves -- written from a longer perspective than any yearly revision -- supply authoritative interpretation and analysis as well as narrative and description. [...] Each is the work of a distinguished scholar, and represents the continuing dedication of the Encyclopaedia Britannica to bringing such works to the general reader." [p. 38.] [All emphasis is mine]
The authoritative nature of the work is strongly instantiated here in lexico-grammatical terms ["authoritative interpretation and analysis"], and also backed up [as in the case of the Norwegian Gyldendal's encyclopaedia] by reference to the distinguished nature of the contributors ["distinguished scholars"], as well as to the dedication of the Britannica organisation to an ideology of creating authoritatively substantiated works for a general readership ["the continuing dedication of the Encyclopaedia Britannica to bringing such works to the general reader"]. Further on in this work we find the following text in the introduction to the section entitled "Bibliography: Recent Books"
"The following list encompasses some 180 recent books that have been judged significant contributions to learning and understanding in their respective fields. [....] The citations are organised by subject area, using the ten parts of the Propaedia as an outline." [p. 61]
Here we can notice the continued emphasis on the quality, and thus the "authoritativeness" of the product by reference to the fact that the selected books have been "judged significant", and this [albeit implicitly] by qualified members of the socioculturally constituted fields where real authority resides in relation to the domains of literature and literary criticism ["in their respective fields]. Furthermore, the systematic and thoroughgoing nature of the whole Britannica project is emphasised by the reference to the links to the ten parts of the Propædia.
The authority implicit in this systematicity is further explicated and formulated by the editors as an ideology which entails legitimization through the up-to-dateness and comparability of the information selected and included in the work, in their introduction at the beginning of the section entitled "1988 Britannica World Data". Here we can read:
"Two principal goals in the creation of the Britannica World Data were up-to-dateness and comparability, each possible separately, but not always possible to combine [...] In general, the editors have opted for maximum up-to-dateness in the country statistical boxes and maximum comparability in the thematic tables, so as to take the best advantage of late information, published and unpublished.
Comparability, however, resides in the meaning of the numbers compiled, which may differ greatly from country to country [...] Every effort has been made to obtain the best combination of comparability and up-to-dateness from available sources, and, when the completeness of a country's published data permitted, to analyse it further for better agreement in coverage, scope and datedness..." [p. 532]
All in all, on this one page, we find the words "up-to-dateness", or synonymical variants of it, such as "most recent", "the latest", "updated continuously" and "datedness" as many as 13 times. The comparability issue too is discussed at great length. The legitimacy of the authority of this particular work is then to a large degree determined and defined by such claims to up-to-dateness. The total length of the 1988 Britannica Book of the Year is just over 900 pages. The enormity of assuring that every item in even such a small work [also seen in relation to the same issue for the whole of the Encyclopaedia Britannica which encompasses several thousand pages] is up to date in a world where new meanings and knowledge is constantly being generated (both within and outside of the discourses of what we know as "science") will of course be immediately apparent.
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