Urban History Encyclopedias: Public, Digital, Scholarly Projects

Author(s): Amanda I. Seligman

Source: The Public Historian , Vol. 35, No. 2 (May 2013), pp. 24-35
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 Urban History Encyclopedias:
Public, Digital, Scholarly
Projects
Amanda I. Seligman

Abstract: Despite skepticism about the scholarly value of urban history encyclopedias,
they represent a convergence of public, digital, and academic history. This essay demon-
strates the existence of doubts about their value and then argues that both writing and
editing urban history encyclopedias are forms of scholarly activity. The conclusion offers
preliminary criteria for assessing urban history encyclopedias as works of scholarship.

Key words: cities, encyclopedias, scholarship, digital history, public history

In 1995, while pursuing a phd in U.S. urban history at Northwestern

University, I picked up some extra, part-time work at Chicago’s Newberry
Library. I worked first as a research assistant for Frederick Hoxie’s Encyclo-
pedia of North American Indians and then for the Encyclopedia of Chicago,
edited by James Grossman, Ann Durkin Keating, and Janice Reiff.1 As a grad-
uate student, I was thrilled to find work that offered the opportunity to learn
my craft, develop mentoring relationships beyond my home department, pick
up some publication credits for writing entries, polish my CV, and earn a little
extra money. What I did not realize at the time was that I was also embarking

1. Frederick Hoxie, ed., The Encyclopedia of North American Indians: Native American
History, Culture, and Life from Paleo-Indians to the Present (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, Col, 1996);
James R. Grossman, Ann Durkin Keating, and Janice L. Reiff, eds., The Encyclopedia of Chicago
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004) and http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/.

The Public Historian, Vol. 35, No. 2, pp. 24–35 (May 2013).
ISSN: 0272-3433, electronic ISSN 1533-8576.
© 2013 by The Regents of the University of California and the
National Council on Public History. All rights reserved.
Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content
through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions Web site:
www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10/1525/tph.2013.35.2.24.

24

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 URBAN HISTORY ENCYCLOPEDIAS & 25

on a course that would shape my career for several decades. What began as
a chance to support my graduate education turned into a long list of articles in
a variety of scholarly encyclopedias and eventually propelled me into a position
as the lead organizer of the Encyclopedia of Milwaukee (EMKE), which is
currently in development at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM).
Along with collaborators in the Departments of History at UWM and
nearby Marquette University, we began planning for the EMKE in 2008.
The print edition will be published by Northern Illinois University Press,
while the digital edition will be hosted on a LAMP stack owned and main-
tained by UWM. The project aims to provide comprehensive coverage of the
history of the four-county Milwaukee metropolitan area, from native settlement
through the present. The online edition will offer features made possible by the
digital environment, including detailed citations, Geographical Information
System maps, digitized primary sources, forums for public discussion of con-
tent, and stories about the research process. Because the project requires the
creation of approximately 720 entries, image research, commissioning of maps,
construction of the website, and a major development effort, we anticipate
a full-scale project launch in 2017.
Despite all of the work involved in managing this kind of project and what
I believe are the self-evident benefits to the members of the public who will
use the finished product, I undertook the project without any guarantee that
my labors would be recognized as scholarship—one of the prime responsibil-
ities of faculty at research universities. I forged ahead for a variety of reasons.
Most important is my conviction that cities need historical encyclopedias that
document their past. When I make the case for the EMKE to prospective
donors, I argue that every major city needs an urban history encyclopedia, just
as it needs a great art museum, an opera company, and a zoo; an encyclopedia
is a cultural landmark. A broad range of the public needs access to the
information and ideas an urban historical encyclopedia assembles, including
genealogists, artists, families, businesses, nonprofits, government, media,
tourists, scholars, and especially students at all stages from elementary
through college and graduate school. An urban history encyclopedia is, in
short, an essential public history project, one that shows the people of a met-
ropolitan region what their place has been like in the past, in order to facilitate
discussion about the future.2

2. The published urban history encyclopedias about cities in the United States include:
Grossman, Keating, and Reiff, The Encyclopedia of Chicago; David D. Van Tassel and John J.
Grabowski, eds., The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana Uni-
versity Press, 1987; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996) and http://ech.cwru.edu/;
David J. Bodenhamer and Robert G. Barrows, The Encyclopedia of Indianapolis (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1994); John E. Kleber, ed., The Encyclopedia of Louisville (Lexington:
University Press of Kentucky, 2001); Leonard Pitt and Dale Pitt, Los Angeles A to Z: An
Encyclopedia of the City and County (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); and
Kenneth T. Jackson, ed., The Encyclopedia of New York City (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1995; 2nd Edition, Yale University Press, 2010). The Philadelphia project is in develop-
ment: Charlene Mires, Howard Gillette, and Randall Miller, eds., The Encyclopedia of Greater

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26 & THE PUBLIC HISTORIAN

Faculty members pursuing projects in digital history may recognize my

lament about the EMKE’s uncertain reception in a research-focused depart-
ment. A recent issue of the Journal of Digital Humanities compiles analyses of
the difficulties digital historians face in interpreting the significance of their
labors to their colleagues and offers answers to their doubts. The risks are
especially acute for junior faculty facing the all-or-nothing tenure evaluation.
Major issues raised include allocation of credit in multi-person projects, the
complications of peer review, and confusion about the comparability of print
and digital products.3 Some of the skepticism about the EMKE stemmed
from its status as a digital history project in a department that understands the
university-press published monograph as the gold standard. In this essay,
however, I focus particularly on the problem of the urban history encyclope-
dia as a genre rather than as a generic digital history project. Urban history
encyclopedia projects, I argue, present special complications that merit rec-
ognition of their status as scholarship. Some of the arguments I present here
are also applicable more broadly to scholarly encyclopedias and do overlap
with the reasons offered for understanding digital history projects as
scholarship.
In this essay, I offer a three-part argument in support of the claim that
writing and editing urban history encyclopedias should count as a worthwhile
scholarly activity. First, I suggest that this argument does in fact need to be
made, because work on such projects often is discounted in the academy.
Second, I discuss why writing encyclopedia articles should count as scholarly
activity. Third, I consider how editing an encyclopedia project should count as
significant scholarly activity. In conclusion, I offer a few suggestions for cri-
teria which we can use to assess the scholarly merits of an urban history
encyclopedia project.

Encyclopedias Discounted

Faculty members know intuitively that writing an encyclopedia entry earns

little credit professionally. Entries are short, and thus presumably do not take
very long to write, compared to the investment of time required for a journal
article or a book. They usually do not get cited as works of original interpre-
tation. They are not eligible for awards. Their anticipated audience is non-
specialists. Because of their readership, the writing may appear elementary.
-
Philadelphia, http://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org. HistoryLink: The Free Online Encyclopedia
of Washington State History, http://www.historylink.org, is structured as a nonprofit organiza-
tion and has its roots in an effort to provide an encyclopedia for Seattle. Cities outside the United
States with their own scholarly encyclopedias include Chuck Davis, ed., The Greater Vancouver
Book: An Urban Encyclopedia (Surrey, BC: Linkman Press, 1997); Christopher Hibbert et al.,
The London Encyclopaedia, 3rd edition (London: Macmillan Reference, 2010), Andrew Brown-
May and Shurlee Swain, eds., The Encyclopedia of Melbourne (Cambridge and New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2005) and http://www.emelbourne.net.au/.
3. Journal of Digital Humanities 1, no. 4 (Fall 2012).

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 URBAN HISTORY ENCYCLOPEDIAS & 27

Encyclopedia entries tend to get lumped in with book reviews: if they count at
all, they count as ‘‘service publications,’’ things we do because a respected
colleague asked us to, not because we are following a promising new line of
inquiry. Generally, we accept these assignments only if we already know
something about the topic. Some scholars simply refuse all such assignments
as not worth their time.
Additionally, there is quite a bit of skepticism among academics about the
overall value of encyclopedias of any stripe. Even when I was doing elemen-
tary school research projects at the public library, my mother sniffed at me
and told me that it was better to look things up in ‘‘real’’ books than encyclo-
pedias.4 In the discussion forums of the Chronicle of Higher Education, one
history professor who is a frequent poster remarked, ‘‘Of course, no encyclo-
pedia should ever be cited in a research paper.’’5 When they do permit the use
of encyclopedias, instructors often tell students not to use them except as
‘‘presearch.’’6
The presumption that encyclopedias are not citable has worsened, it seems
to me, since the advent of Wikipedia, the world’s leading digital encyclopedia.
Although Wikipedia is a valuable resource under many circumstances, its
legion of documented problems include the ability of anyone to contribute,
its prohibition on original research, and its suspicion of cutting edge scholar-
ship.7 In an essay dedicated primarily to the virtues of Wikipedia, AHA
President William Cronon wrote in the February 2012 issue of Perspectives,
‘‘Like every teacher, I caution my students not to rely on encyclopedias when
doing serious research.’’8 Such a blanket condemnation appears to dismiss the
possibility that serious researchers would find anything of value in an ency-
clopedia, perhaps even a specialty encyclopedia produced by other scholars.
Cronon’s notion of ‘‘serious research’’ also does not consider the possibility
that when scholars write or prepare to teach, there might be things that we do
not know and would like to look up efficiently, without wading through
narrative and analysis extraneous to our immediate purpose.

4. She must have felt the way I feel when I am reminded that twenty-first century students’
first research impulse for answering any question is to ask Google.
5. larryc, March 15, 2007, http://chronicle.com/forums/index.php/topic,35606.msg503092.
html#msg503092, last accessed January 26, 2013.
6. I borrow the term ‘‘presearch’’ from Barbara Rockenbach, comment on Amanda I.
Seligman, ‘‘Teaching Wikipedia Without Apologies,’’ in Writing History in the Digital Age, ed.
Jack Dougherty and Kristen Nawrotski (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, in press),
http://writinghistory.trincoll.edu/teach/teaching-wikipedia-without-apologies-seligman/, October
21, 2011.
7. I lay out my thoughts on Wikipedia in detail in the Writing History in the Digital Age
project, in Seligman, ‘‘Teaching Wikipedia without Apologies.’’ In addition to the other essays on
Wikipedia in that volume, see Roy Rosenzweig, ‘‘Can History Be Open Source? Wikipedia and
the Future of the Past,’’ Journal of American History 93, no. 1 (June 2006): 117-46; and Timothy
Messer-Kruse, ‘‘The ‘Undue Weight’ of Truth on Wikipedia,’’ The Chronicle of Higher Education
online, February 12, 2012, accessed January 20, 2013, http://chronicle.com/article/The-Undue-
Weight-of-Truth-on/130704/.
8. William Cronon, ‘‘Scholarly Authority in a Wikified World,’’ Perspectives on History,
February 2012, 5.

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28 & THE PUBLIC HISTORIAN

Encyclopedia Writing as Scholarly

At least a part of the difficulty associated with understanding encyclopedia

writing as scholarly activity has to do with the common assumption that
encyclopedia writing is ‘‘factual’’ rather than interpretive. Encyclopedias are
authoritative and objective, written from a neutral standpoint. Wikipedia
enshrines this assumption in its policy that entries are to be ‘‘NPOV’’—Neutral
Point of View.9 As scholars, however, we can recognize the untenability of this
position.10 Two examples can illustrate how urban history encyclopedias offer
more than a recitation of true facts in their inevitable order. First consider the
interpretive power of Joseph C. Biggott’s article on ‘‘Balloon Frame Construc-
tion’’ in the Encyclopedia of Chicago. The argument that comes right out of
Biggott’s scholarly monograph. His argument contradicts the received wisdom
that the balloon frame house form sprang up de novo in Chicago; rather, he
argues, it was the product of an architectural evolution.11 The Encyclopedia of
Chicago editors knew that they were asking for when they commissioned the
entry from him; they wanted readers to encounter Biggott’s interpretation
rather than the older, popular view. Consider, likewise, how the significance
of the World Trade Center changed between publication of the first and
second editions of The Encyclopedia of New York City. In the first edition,
published in 1995, the World Trade Center article occupied one column with
no illustrations. It was mostly about architecture and construction, with a short
paragraph devoted to the terrorist car bombing of 1993.12 The second edi-
tion—understandably, for it was published in 2010—encompassed approxi-
mately five columns of prose and included three photographs of the site.
The length of the revised entry demonstrated how much more significant for
New York City and global history the World Trade Center site had become in
the years since the first volume’s publication. Although much of the original
emphasis on architecture remained in the revised article, the heart of the
entry was now about the still-shifting post-9/11 plans for the site. The
authors had to grapple with an additional problem historians are not accus-
tomed to writing about—how to discuss an unfinished event, in this case the
site’s redevelopment. These observations about the transformation in the
content of the entry are not at all intended as criticism, but to point out that
the international significance of the World Trade Center buildings changed

9. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPOV, accessed February 13, 2012. The other two key

principles are ‘‘verifiability’’ and ‘‘no original research.’’
10. The perhaps most intellectually accessible version of the argument underpinning the idea
presented here is William Cronon, ‘‘A Place for Stories,’’ Journal of American History 78, no. 4
(March 1992): 1347-76.
11. Joseph C. Biggott, ‘‘Balloon Frame Construction,’’ http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohis-
tory.org/pages/105.html, last accessed February 13, 2012. See Joseph C. Biggott, From Cottage to
Bungalow: Houses and the Working Class in Metropolitan Chicago, 1869-1929 (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 2001), 19.
12. Anthony W. Robins, ‘‘World Trade Center,’’ in The Encyclopedia of New York City,
edited by Kenneth T. Jackson (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1995), 1276-77.

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 URBAN HISTORY ENCYCLOPEDIAS & 29

in 2001, and the authors were compelled to change the lens through which
they viewed the site.13
Therefore, encyclopedia entries bear some of the major hallmarks of schol-
arly activity: they are interpretive, and they are synthetic. City history encyclo-
pedias (like other place-based encyclopedias such as those devoted to regions
and states) in particular also rely on primary source research, perhaps more so
than scholarly, non-place-based encyclopedias. Theme or period-based schol-
arly encyclopedias usually rely on a solid base of available secondary scholar-
ship and draw on active authors in the field; without such a base, it is unlikely
that a commercial publishing house or editor would embark on the project.
Motivated by civic as well as scholarly considerations, however, an urban
history encyclopedia rests on an uneven base of secondary scholarship—most
cities’ histories are covered only imperfectly in writing, even when they enjoy
a rich combination of existing scholarly and local amateur history. When the
editors decide to offer comprehensive geographic coverage for a city, region, or
state, they are dependent on original research to achieve the breadth required
of their subject. Local historians sometimes write neighborhood or municipal
histories that they can synthesize into a 500-word entry based on their accu-
mulated knowledge; but probably just as often a graduate student must be
deployed to dig through primary sources in order to get that story told.
The major way in which encyclopedias depart from our baseline of ‘‘nor-
mal’’ scholarship is that the encyclopedic format discourages engagement in
historiographic debate—although encyclopedia content can and should
reflect historiographic developments. Instead, encyclopedias are like text-
books, museum exhibits, and other works directed toward a popular or non-
scholarly audience more interested in what happened than in scholars’
debates. Although authors make choices about how their entries relate to
an existing literature, their prose tends to mask the scholarly debates in which
they are embedded and by which they are informed. Instead, their narrative
smoothes out those questions into a resolution that will make sense to a gen-
eral, educated audience—into a synthesis. Encyclopedic writing is firmly
rooted in scholarship but makes a practice of masking that debt.

Encyclopedia Editing as Scholarly

Having claimed that writing an encyclopedia entry is a scholarly activity,

I turn now to how editing an urban history encyclopedia is a scholarly enter-
prise. Editing an encyclopedia project intersects directly with standard schol-
arship in six ways. Some of these considerations show considerable overlap with
the broader problem of interpreting digital history projects as scholarly.

13. Jameson W. Doig, Anthony W. Robins, Alex Garvin, and Lisa Keller, ‘‘World Trade
Center,’’ in The Encyclopedia of New York City, 2nd edition, edited by Kenneth T. Jackson (New
Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2010), 1415-18.

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30 & THE PUBLIC HISTORIAN

First, the work of encyclopedia editors involves handling a large scale body
of knowledge. That ‘‘handling,’’ to be sure, is collaborative. Much of the heavy
lifting is conducted as much by research assistants and entry authors as
by editors. Several of the authors featured in the recent special issue of the
Journal of Digital Humanities point out that collaboration in the humanities
does not mean that everyone puts in less effort; rather, collaboration is
required because digital history projects rely on the synergy of varied forms
of expertise, most notably content, design, and technical experience.14 For
their part, editors make crucial decisions about the structure and organization
of encyclopedic knowledge. For example, as the editors of the Encyclopedia
of Chicago take pains to explain in their introduction, ‘‘the central tension in
a work that seeks to combine encyclopedic detail with integrative analysis lies
in the principle of ‘lumping’ versus ‘splitting.’’’15 The editors intentionally
decided, for instance, not to commission a separate entry on the Sears (now
Willis) Tower, then the tallest building on the North American continent and
therefore a strong candidate for an individual entry. Instead, readers who
want to learn about the Sears Tower are directed to see ‘‘Skyscrapers’’ and
other entries that put the building into its architectural and historical context.
When editors split, or separate, related topics, allowing their individual treat-
ment, they permit the fragmentation of readers’ knowledge of discrete to-
pics—this allows them to provide depth of information, but creates a need for
extensive cross-referencing to facilitate readers’ intellectual breadth.16
‘‘Lumping’’ by contrast, creates an experience for readers in which they must
see the initial topic of their interest in relationship to other similar items. The
decision to lump or split demands that authors create prose within very
specific parameters and in turn requires the policing of the execution of these
decisions by editors as the project’s contents are finalized.
The example of the lumping and splitting decision points toward the most
important choices the editors make—structuring the Table of Contents, in
which editors decide what to include and exclude. Editorial decisions about
the architecture of knowledge determine the scholarly spine for the urban
history encyclopedia (and, indeed, any encyclopedia). In developing the
Encyclopedia of Milwaukee we have followed the practice modeled by the
Encyclopedia of Chicago: the division of the cityscape into a set of compre-
hensive, categorical ‘‘rubrics,’’ or thematic areas, from which the titles of
specific entries were then elaborated. On a practical level, the editors know
that it might be impossible to commission every entry to which we aspire. In
planning the project, we estimate that somewhere between a third and a half

14. Bethany Nowviskie, ‘‘Evaluating Collaborative Digital Scholarship (or, Where Credit is
Due)’’: 16-29; Todd Presner, ‘‘How to Evaluate Digital Scholarship’’: 36-38; and Evaluation Wiki
of the Committee on Information Technology, Modern Language Association, ‘‘Documenting
a New Media Case’’: 94-97; all in Journal of Digital Humanities 1 no. 4 (2012), iBook.
15. Grossman, Keating, and Reiff, The Encyclopedia of Chicago, xxvi.
16. Cross-referencing and hyperlinking, which are integral to how readers access encyclo-
pedia content, merit in-depth exploration as scholarly activities beyond the scope of this essay.

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 URBAN HISTORY ENCYCLOPEDIAS & 31

of the entries right now have no obvious author—and we have not been able
to identify existing scholarship on the topic that might underpin an entry by
a nonexpert author. We expect that some of the aspirational entries will prove
impossible to commission and require too much graduate assistant time to be
practical to write in the long run—and so will be absent from the final project.
Thus the difference between the projected Table of Contents and the actual
Table of Contents reflects a gap between scholarly intent and the pragmatics of
a particular project. That gap further reflects the project as a work of histori-
ography. As we wrote in our grant application to the National Endowment for
the Humanities, the EMKE’s Table of Contents will reflect what is known and
knowable about the history of the Milwaukee area at the point of its publication.
Editorial engagement with the state of the art of scholarship reflects a third
way in which urban history encyclopedias are scholarly. Notably, for example,
the Encyclopedia of Chicago was founded on ‘‘a commitment to a vision of
a metropolitan area whose past, present and future rest on the principle of
interdependence.’’17 Reflecting the state of the art of urban history—embracing
suburbs as essential to fully understanding a city’s history—the editors
included entries on all the municipalities throughout the region, not just
Chicago. The Philadelphia project has built the assumption of the salience
of the hinterland right into its name: The Encyclopedia of Greater Phila-
delphia.18 Other areas in which the contents of urban history encyclopedias
can showcase recent historiographic developments include their attention
to emergent areas of environmental history or social history such as dis-
ability studies and LGBT history.
In addition to drawing on recent existing scholarship, urban history ency-
clopedias can also help to generate new scholarship. This prospect is certainly
one that motivates the Encyclopedia of Milwaukee. With an editorial team
based in the history departments of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
and Marquette University, both with graduate programs with strengths in
urban history, we very much hope to inspire new scholarly activity on the
Milwaukee area. Hiring graduate Project Assistants whose research focuses
on Milwaukee history is a natural fit, and we hope to see master’s theses and
dissertations influenced by the project in coming years. Participation in the
project has already begun to inspire the graduate student Project Assistants to
publish on related topics in their areas of expertise. For example, the EMKE
bibliographer, now a doctoral student in UWM’s School of Information Stud-
ies, delivered a paper about the organization of project content to the Cana-
dian Association of Information Science meeting.19 Other publications we

17. Grossman, Keating, and Reiff, xxv.

18. Emphasis added. The regional approach’s importance is further underscored by the fact
that production of The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia is centered in New Jersey, at
Rutgers University-Camden, rather than in Philadelphia proper.
19. Ann Graf and Richard Smiraglia, ‘‘Cultural Curation as Classification: The Evolution of
the Bibliography and Taxonomy for The Encyclopedia of Milwaukee,’’ Canadian Association for
Information Science, 40th Annual Conference, May 31-June 2, 2012, Waterloo, Ontario.

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32 & THE PUBLIC HISTORIAN

anticipate include an article about lessons learned in the early stages of planning
the electronic edition of the project and a printed version of the bibliography
itself.20 Finally, we expect that, once launched, the Encyclopedia of Milwaukee
will be an essential starting point for future scholarly projects on the city and
region.
Fifth, because urban history encyclopedias are now conceptualized as on-
line projects, they are of necessity catapulted into the field of digital history.
Scholars launching such projects need to immerse themselves not only in the
familiar world of urban history, but also in the rapidly developing field of the
digital humanities. This commitment implies reviewing existing websites;
attending digital history sessions of conferences such as the AHA; participat-
ing in THATCamps, ‘‘unconferences’’ in which participants teach each other
about the digital humanities;21 becoming conversant enough in technological
lingo to persuade university administrators to invest in the hardware infra-
structure needed to support the project; developing sufficient digital literacy to
communicate with IT staff members; figuring out social media such as the
compressed language of Twitter; and otherwise becoming digitally competent.
Digital projects also have the capacity to iterate over time once a ‘‘finished’’
project is launched. In the EMKE office, anticipating that our discussion
forums will require moderation and that the entries will require updating,
we have already begun trying to envision how to take advantage of our mas-
ter’s program in public history to staff the project after its formal launch—and
how to fund the Encyclopedia of Milwaukee’s ongoing existence.
These new digital competencies feed back into faculty members’ research,
pedagogy, and service. My own teaching has already been transformed as
a result of work on this project. I revised my undergraduate history methods
class to include a session and related assignment devoted to the digital archive,
rethought existing assignments in light of questions raised by the digital envi-
ronment, and committed to teach our graduate seminar on ‘‘History and the
New Media.’’22 I also find myself involved in campus-based conversations about
how UWM can prepare for digital humanities in the 21st century.
Finally, producing an urban history encyclopedia is a large-scale project
management exercise. All of the existing U.S. urban history encyclopedias
have been published by university presses rather than by reference-oriented,
commercial presses such as Greenwood or CQ/Sage. Commercial presses
have well-oiled systems for commissioning entries and tracking their progress
through editing—editors receive prose to edit but the press itself manages the
commissioning paperwork and workflow. With a contract for an urban history
encyclopedia published by a university press, the weight of this not insignificant

20. For a video description of the development of academic-IT collaboration on the EMKE,
see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v¼J5pH_60R7zA.
21. http://thatcamp.org/. Last accessed January 26, 2013.
22. I invite public feedback on the development of this course at the blog where I am
tracking the evolution of my thinking on its contents, http://reluctantdigitalhistorian.blogspot.
com/.

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 URBAN HISTORY ENCYCLOPEDIAS & 33

workflow falls onto the academic team and its staff. In the case of the Ency-
clopedia of Chicago volume produced in the 1990s, that work was handled in
the office of the managing editor, who maintained a system of paper files that
coordinated with electronic versions of the entries. Much of the editing and
fact-checking occurred on paper copies marked up with a rainbow of Post-It
notes. In the case of the EMKE now under development, the workflow process
is incorporated into an electronic ‘‘back-end’’ system that will load content both
onto the website and for delivery to the press. In addition to planning the ‘‘front
end’’ system, which will display content to the public, the editors work with the
IT staff to design an original back-end system.23 The IT team acknowledges the
complexity of the project by assigning a ‘‘Project Manager’’ to work with the
academics; the academic team has a de facto project manager as well. Further,
because urban history encyclopedias rest on imperfect and incomplete bases of
scholarship, research staff are needed to write some of the entries. Managing
a small fleet of graduate assistants is no inconsiderable task.
This activity appears to be primarily managerial rather than scholarly. But
Sheila Cavanaugh and Bethany Nowviskie both argue that humanists need to
reinterpret the labor involved in collaboration in the digital age.24 The uneven
base of existing scholarship helps to explain why urban history encyclopedias
need to be funded by grants and private donations in a way that does not seem
to be true of scholarly encyclopedias published by commercial presses. This
condition, in turn, leads to the need for the editors to do major development
and fundraising work as part of the effort to get projects off the ground—
which in turn creates many early opportunities for both peer and public
review of the project. Collectively, all these considerations reflect the schol-
arly value of the project and also underscore the scale of the commitment
needed for their creation.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I would like to offer some preliminary criteria that we can

use for evaluating urban history encyclopedias as works of scholarship. The
model for recognizing production of urban history encyclopedias as legitimate
scholarly activity is already embedded in considerations of public history as
a form of scholarship. In a joint report adopted in 2010, the American His-
torical Association, the National Council on Public History, and the Organi-
zation of American Historians called for university authorities to ‘‘look beyond

23. This approach to the content management system is recommended as a best practice in
Doug Barnett, Bob Beatty, Matthew Gibson, Uri Nodelman, Ann Toplovich, and Jamil Zainaldin,
‘‘Internet Digital Encyclopedia Alliance: Toward a Community of Practice: Initial Findings on
Best Practices for Digital Encyclopedias,’’ May 27, 2011 (IDEA White Paper), p. 24.
24. Sheila Cavanagh, ‘‘Living in a Digital World: Rethinking Peer Review, Collaboration, and
Open Access,’’ Journal of Digital Humanities 1 no. 4 (2012), iBook: 4-15; Nowviskie, ‘‘Evaluating
Collaborative Digital Scholarship.’’

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34 & THE PUBLIC HISTORIAN

the traditional monograph when evaluating public history creativity and

productivity’’ and laid out a set of ‘‘best practices and recommendations’’ for
use in evaluation of faculty participation in public history projects.25 With an
eye toward merit pay and tenure and promotion committees, scholars have
similarly also begun to lay out a program for the evaluation of work in digital
history. Their considerations include matters such as rigor, peer review, print
‘‘equivalencies,’’ and credit allocation, all of which apply to urban history
encyclopedias as well.
This initial list of criteria for evaluating urban history encyclopedias is
meant to begin to create a substantive framework for assessing the scholarly
contribution of this particular type of project; it should complement, not
supersede, the growing consensus about evaluating public history work and
digital history work in general. When evaluating the scholarly contribution of
urban history encyclopedias, we should:

 Assess the completeness of their coverage. Is the Table of Contents

comprehensive or spotty? Are the places and people who comprise the
city and its metropolitan area fully described? Do any gaps reflect holes
in the universe of local and scholarly knowledge, or are they intentional
or unintentional omissions by the editors?
 Ask to what extent they capture the state of the art in local history. Cities
like Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles, which rest on
deep bases of knowledge produced by generations of scholarly attention,
may well be able to support encyclopedic content that can be more
comprehensive than smaller, selectively studied cities like Milwaukee
and other Midwestern cities.26 In evaluating these works, we should
consider the degree to which they reflect both the riches of existing
local history sources and point toward potentially fruitful lines of further
inquiry.
 Consider the degree to which they are informed by broad developments
in urban history scholarship, in both the evidentiary and conceptual
senses. Have they made informed and excellent use of appropriate,
available resources? Do their Tables of Contents and the interpretations
offered in entries respond to the cutting edge of the scholarship in which
they are embedded?
 Recognize that as public history projects, urban history encyclopedias
are designed for a broad audience potentially ranging from schoolchil-
dren to scholars. Have entries been written in language accessible to

25. The Working Group on Evaluating Public History Scholarship (with representatives from
the American Historical Association, the National Council on Public History, and the Organi-
zation of American Historians), ‘‘Tenure, Promotion, and the Publicly Engaged Academic His-
torian,’’ 2010, http://ncph.org/cms/wp-content/uploads/Engaged-Historian.pdf, last accessed
January 26, 2013.
26. In his comments as discussant at the OAH/NCPH session where this essay originated,
Kenneth Jackson posed the question: why are so many of the extant urban history encyclopedias
devoted to Midwestern cities?

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 URBAN HISTORY ENCYCLOPEDIAS & 35

students without sacrificing significant theoretical concepts like social

class and causation? Are the contents and presentation designed to be
intellectually substantive as well as technologically appealing?
Urban history encyclopedias represent a convergence of public history,
digital history, and urban history projects. They serve both the needs of the
public for careful presentation of information about the local past and of the
academic community for systematic assemblage of the state of knowledge
about places under study. We have reached a point in the development of
the genre where we are ready to interpret urban history encyclopedias to our
peers as full-fledged works of scholarship.

Amanda I. Seligman is Associate Professor of History and Urban Studies at the

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her books include Block by Block: Neighborhoods and
Public Policy on Chicago’s West Side (University of Chicago Press, 2005) and Is Graduate
School Really for You?: The Whos, Whats, Whys, and Hows of Pursuing a Master’s or Ph.D.
(The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012). With Margo Anderson, she is co-editor of The
Encyclopedia of Milwaukee, a project funded by the National Endowment for the Human-
ities with an anticipated launch date in 2017.
I gratefully acknowledge the administrators, faculty, and staff of the University of
Wisconsin-Milwaukee for providing substantial moral, technical, intellectual, and financial
support for the Encyclopedia of Milwaukee project and the University of Wisconsin System
Regents, who provided a sabbatical leave that in part supported the writing of this essay.
I would also like to thank Thomas Jabonsky, who offered a helpful and gracious last-minute
intervention in this essay.

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