{"id":3887,"date":"2009-05-03T16:34:16","date_gmt":"2009-05-03T20:34:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/?p=3887"},"modified":"2009-05-03T16:34:16","modified_gmt":"2009-05-03T20:34:16","slug":"dont-know-much-about-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/dont-know-much-about-history","title":{"rendered":"Don’t know much about history. . ."},"content":{"rendered":"

As someone whose focus of study in college was the evolution of the encyclopedic novel, I was fascinated by this brief article by Randall Stross on the birth and death of Encarta, Microsoft’s encyclopedia<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Gary Alt, who joined Microsoft in 1995 after working as an editor at World Book and at Encyclopedia Britannica, spoke with pride of the editorial work that he and his Encarta team had done. Fifty people \u00e2\u20ac\u201d editors, fact-checkers and indexers \u00e2\u20ac\u201d were on the team in 2000, at the peak of Microsoft\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s editorial investment in Encarta, he said.<\/p>\n

That investment, however, seems to have gone unnoticed by Encarta\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s users. Tom Corddry, a senior manager at Microsoft from 1989 to 1996 who headed up its multimedia publishing unit, said, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The editors overestimated the way students would say, \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcThis has been carefully edited! And is very authoritative!\u00e2\u20ac\u2122\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I liked the way Stross avoids the easy out of “encyclopedias are rendered worthless by Wikipedia” and instead focuses on Google’s indexing process as a meta-encyclopedia of human knowledge. One of my greatest advantages in this world is my ability to come up with the right combination of words to find information.<\/p>\n

I’m not being facetious; there’s a skill to figuring out what words or phrases someone else would have written in a web-page or blog-post about a certain topic. I should put “Internet gumshoe” on my non-existent business cards.<\/p>\n

(Bonus! I didn’t do much research on Diderot and the encyclopedia’s roots in the Enlightenment<\/a> during my college project, largely because I knew almost nothing about the history of philosophy and knowledge. On the plus side, I’m now painfully aware of how ignorant I was, so that means I’m on the path to, um, something!)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As someone whose focus of study in college was the evolution of the encyclopedic novel, I was fascinated by this brief article by Randall Stross on the birth and death of Encarta, Microsoft’s encyclopedia: Gary Alt, who joined Microsoft in 1995 after working as an editor at World Book and at Encyclopedia Britannica, spoke with … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Don’t know much about history. . .”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[677],"class_list":["post-3887","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-diderot"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4C7K-10H","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":8986,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/episode-131-ever-after","url_meta":{"origin":3887,"position":0},"title":"Episode 131 – Ever After","author":"Gil","date":"August 25, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"Virtual Memories Show #131: John Clute - Ever After \"In Fantastika, the metaphor tends to move to the literal. In a naturalistic novel, the literal tends to move into a metaphor.\" John Clute, winner of multiple Hugo Awards and World Fantasy Awards, joins the show to talk about the history\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "literature"","block_context":{"text":"literature","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/literature"},"img":{"alt_text":"clute_med","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-content\/uploads\/clute_med-398x440.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":9206,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/episode-145-kathe-koja-and-john-clute","url_meta":{"origin":3887,"position":1},"title":"Episode 145 – Kathe Koja and John Clute","author":"Gil","date":"November 30, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"\u00a0 Virtual Memories Show #145: Kathe Koja and John Clute \"I started writing stories as soon as I knew what stories were. I taught myself to type when I was 8 years old, because I couldn't write fast enough.\" Novelist and immersive theater director Kathe Koja joins the show to\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "literature"","block_context":{"text":"literature","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/literature"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-content\/uploads\/22236568714_8abb264749_o.jpg?fit=1200%2C900&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-content\/uploads\/22236568714_8abb264749_o.jpg?fit=1200%2C900&resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-content\/uploads\/22236568714_8abb264749_o.jpg?fit=1200%2C900&resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-content\/uploads\/22236568714_8abb264749_o.jpg?fit=1200%2C900&resize=700%2C400 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-content\/uploads\/22236568714_8abb264749_o.jpg?fit=1200%2C900&resize=1050%2C600 3x"},"classes":[]},{"id":2006,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/magaziner","url_meta":{"origin":3887,"position":2},"title":"Magaziner","author":"Gil","date":"April 16, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"I'll be pretty busy this week, getting the May issue together. We launched the magazine in 1999, and I'm a little embarrassed that I've yet to do any sort of redesign since then. But dammit, Jim, I'm an editor, not a designer! Except that we all do our own designs\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Big Business"","block_context":{"text":"Big Business","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/big-business"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1105,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/whats-an-interweb","url_meta":{"origin":3887,"position":3},"title":"What’s an interweb?","author":"Gil","date":"September 7, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"Big off-site sales meeting today, to discuss online sales strategies for the company. I'm not in sales, but they brought me in (along with our VP\/editorial director) to give some perspective on how the editors can contribute good web-based content. It was a critical meeting, in which we hammered out\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Big Business"","block_context":{"text":"Big Business","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/big-business"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3861,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/surfs-down","url_meta":{"origin":3887,"position":4},"title":"Surf’s down","author":"Gil","date":"April 30, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"The new issue of Sports Illustrated arrived yesterday in the mail. This morning, I flipped through it, looking for coverage of the fantastically competitive first-round NBA playoff series between the Bulls and the Celtics. There it was! Five full pages! Three of which were photos! (Well, after subtracting long pull-quotes\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "basketball"","block_context":{"text":"basketball","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/sports\/basketball"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1442,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/i-wish-i-could-fail-this-well","url_meta":{"origin":3887,"position":5},"title":"I wish I could fail this well","author":"Gil","date":"April 10, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"There's a bizarre article in the NYTimes today, about the appointment of two editors at Consumer Reports and the mag's upcoming redesign. It begins: As it struggles to recover from a recent flawed article about children\u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00e2\u201e\u00a2s car seats, Consumer Reports has named two new editors and announced a redesign. Hmm.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Big Business"","block_context":{"text":"Big Business","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/big-business"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3887","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3887"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3887\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3888,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3887\/revisions\/3888"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3887"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3887"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3887"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}