Tuesday, February 14, 12:30-1:45PM
MITH Conference Room, B0135 McKeldin Library
Co-sponsored by the Department of English
“Knowledge and Meaning in the Information Age: A Humanist Perspective on Wikipedia” by MELANIE KILL
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.
This talk will be held in the MITH Conference Room, in the basement of McKeldin Library.
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.
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All talks free and open to the public. Attendees are welcome to bring their own lunches.