I’ve mentioned that Wikipedia entries can be collected into bound books, thanks to Wikipedia’s partnership with a print-on-demand publisher. However, Read Write Web reports that boutique publisher James Bridle (whom we’ve mentioned a few times before for other reasons) has gone this idea one better: he has collected five years of the edit history of a Wikipedia entry into a rather handsome twelve volume set of hardcover books.
The entry in question is “Iraq War”, and the reason Bridle did it was to point out that historiography is important. Because of Wikipedia’s change-tracking, he notes, we are able to see not only what the entry says now, but the complete process by which it arrived at how it is now. “We need to talk about historiography, to surface this process, to challenge absolutist narratives of the past, and thus, those of the present and our future."
The Read Write Web article also features the audio of a 25-minute talk Bridle gave about the project at the dConstruct conference in Brighton, England.
I have to admit, the idea of presenting a series of Wikipedia edits—the epitome of electronic ephemera—as a set of printed books is pretty interesting, though it seems to be the sort of book that exists simply to prove a point rather than to be read. (As one commenter on the RWW article said, “I’ll just wait for the movie.”) But the point is a pretty important one—electronic media can leave the kind of audit trail printed works can only dream about, and that can be important to all sorts of research down the road.
