The new encyclopedia model

[Hegemony]

I'm one of a group of people who came up with the idea that we should put together an encyclopedia in our field — an emerging field that does not yet have any wide-ranging reference books.

But I see that the new model of encyclopedia is a collection of articles online.  For instance, Oxford Research Encyclopedias (https://oxfordre.com/) or various encyclopedias published by Cambridge (here is the online Encyclopedia of Anthropology: http://www.anthroencyclopedia.com/).

These seem as if they're more publisher-led than scholar-led.  They don't list anyone as a general editor, and I get the sense that the press just appoints a scholar to devise a list of articles, and someone farms them out over time.  So it's not the same kind of enterprise as a book assembled by a group of scholars and then handed over to a press.

What does a group like us do, in the new model?  Do we just say, "Hey, we think Basketweaving Studies would be a good subject, you should commission some articles"?  That seems kind of lackluster.  How does one get a whole Basketweaving Encyclopedia out in this day and age?

[Parasaurolophus]

IMO, the gold standard for this sort of thing is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: <https://plato.stanford.edu/>. Incidentally, it was also one of the first major digital humanities projects. I think that the 'About' page has some of the framework- and setup-level information you're looking for, and you can glean a lot of the rest from the encyclopedia's structure (editorial board, area editors, etc.).

It's scholar-led, free, open-source, and a completely robust resource. It even gets cited in research articles. Contributors are invited, but they're all bona fide experts in the topic for which they're writing an entry. Some of the entries are a little wanting, but most are of really high quality. You should paddle around it for yourself, but some representative entries are: consequentialism, deontic logic, feminist philosophy, Goodman's aesthetics, implicit bias, and intuitionism in the philosophy of mathematics.

[Hegemony]

I've seen the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.  My question is not so much about how it works from the reader's point of view, as how it works from the would-be editor's point of view.  Who decides which encyclopedia gets added to the stable of online ones from, say, Oxford or Cambridge, as I cited above?  In the traditional print publishing model, often the academic says, "Hey, we should have an Encyclopedia of Basketweaving, I'll propose that I edit one for the press."  But in this new model, the person in charge seems to be the press.  So individuals might propose specific articles, but they don't propose "Hey, how about including a whole Encyclopedia of Basketweaving, and I'll edit it" — because it no longer works that way.  So if I want to propose an Encyclopedia of Basketweaving, what do I do?  Go to one of the presses that is still publishing encyclopedias in print?

[Parasaurolophus]

Oh, I see. I thought you were asking about setting up an encyclopedia that was entirely independent from a publishing house, like the SEP. (Stanford hosts its content, but that's pretty much the extent of their involvement.) I'm afraid I have no idea how that particular situation works, so I'll shut my trap!

(I do think you might be better-served by something akin to the SEP, though, since you wouldn't have to worry about marketability or constraints imposed by the press. And I'd imagine it'd be a lot easier to get some grant funding for an open-source and open-access project like that. There's a good bit of institutional prestige to be had, too.)

[Hegemony]

Sadly, you know the main reason for me not to develop an independent online project like the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy?  I mean, apart from the ongoing hassle of keeping it timely and updated.  It's that most of the scholars in the field I'm considering are younger scholars, and their universities probably won't count online publications, even ones like this, as tenure-worthy.  My own university wouldn't. I know that should change, I know it is changing, slowly, at many places — but it hasn't changed enough for me to ask a lot of younger scholars to devote a lot of time to something that may damage rather than increase their tenure chances.

[polly_mer]

Can you get a national professional organization to sponsor a working group to draft something that will eventually evolve into the online encyclopedia? 

I ask because I can think of many online resources I use started as working group products that found a home as they became more useful than just the working group web page hidden in the professional society huge site.

Of course that assumes that service to the profession counts towards tenure in a noticeable way.

[sinenomine]

I worked with a group a number of years ago to plan and develop an encyclopedia for our field. Section editors solicited and coordinated the writing of entries by people in their respective areas and wrote entries that didn't get claimed, and the entire project was overseen by one person. it came out in hard copy through an academic publisher, and updates are ongoing in an online version. It was a lot of organization and hard work, but the results were great.

[Hegemony]

Sinenomine, I gather that most publishers don't do it that way any more.

And the field is new enough that there is no national professional organization.  I also do not have the time or energy to start a national professional organization, particularly one that is just a stepping stone on the way to an encyclopedia!

[polly_mer]

And the field is new enough that there is no national professional organization.  I also do not have the time or energy to start a national professional organization, particularly one that is just a stepping stone on the way to an encyclopedia!

I was thinking more like an umbrella organization like the American Physical Society, or American Chemical Society where thousands of members already exist, but smaller units pop into existence every few years as groups of people see the need for a more focused discussion in a new research area.  Those smaller units then often write communal documents/webpages/etc. as part of building a new community of researchers.

Does the MLA or something similar not have that kind of structure?

[Hegemony]

It's an interdisciplinary field that really doesn't fit well under any general umbrella.  It's partly humanities, partly social science, and partly STEM.  And all I want to do is to propose an encyclopedia to someone!  But more easily said than done.

[polly_mer]

So why an encyclopedia as a first step instead of a working group for discussion and sharing information?

[Parasaurolophus]

I just had a thought--what about a handbook, rather than an encyclopedia proper? Those are published by the big presses, but are scholar-led. As a reader, I've used them a fair bit, and do have occasion to cite individual contributions. I've also seen them cited. Some of the handbooks I've seen look more like encyclopediæ, and others more like edited collections.

I've never been involved in generating one, but it looks to me like those get pitched rather more like edited collections than the farmed-out model of the press's encyclopediæ.

[Hegemony]

To answer Polly, we already have a working group.  The working group decided that what it wanted was an encyclopedia.

I guess we could do a handbook — assuming they still start in print rather than online.

[fast_and_bulbous]

But I see that the new model of encyclopedia is a collection of articles online.  For instance, Oxford Research Encyclopedias (https://oxfordre.com/) or various encyclopedias published by Cambridge (here is the online Encyclopedia of Anthropology: http://www.anthroencyclopedia.com/).

These seem as if they're more publisher-led than scholar-led.  They don't list anyone as a general editor, and I get the sense that the press just appoints a scholar to devise a list of articles, and someone farms them out over time.  So it's not the same kind of enterprise as a book assembled by a group of scholars and then handed over to a press.

I can speak to being an author of an Oxford Research Encyclopedia article. I was approached to write an article for the ORE based upon my recent research. I acquiesced. The editor sent me a couple examples of other articles in my field that were already published in their encyclopedia. It wasn't something I did for any box to tick (since I'm no longer faculty), it was because it was kind of cool to be considered to even write such a thing, and I had never done that kind of broad kind of article before. I'm glad I did it (article is currently in press) but I'd probably won't do something like that again until I'm at the end of my career, and no longer wrangling several grants. A large part of the 10Kword article was a review of the early days of the subfield, stuff I had never read before. So, from a certain perspective, I am a more "well rounded scholar" for having done it. But it was super time consuming, mostly done on my own time, where I had multiple extensions and where I finally had to spend a week over the winter holiday to just grind it out over a week or so period.

Not sure if any of that is useful to you or not. I have found the articles in my subfield to be well done and authored by some of the best in the field.