Web Site Review

This review appears in the June 2007 issue of the JAH, pp. 363–64.

The Encyclopedia of Chicago, http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/. Published and maintained by the Chicago History Museum, the Newberry Library, and Northwestern University. Reviewed June–Oct. 2006.

Brilliantly conceptualized, edited, managed, and produced, the print and online Encyclopedia of Chicago is one of the finest collective works (with 633 listed authors) of North American historical scholarship of our era, a worthy match for another such landmark, The Encyclopedia of New York City (1995), edited by Kenneth T. Jackson.

The print version opens with a declaration: “The editors of The Encyclopedia of Chicago began with a commitment to a vision of a metropolitan area whose past, present, and future rest on the principle of interdependence” (Janice L. Reiff, Ann Durkin Keating, and James R. Grossman, eds., The Encyclopedia of Chicago, 2004, p. xxv). Thus, while the Encyclopedia of Chicago focuses on the city of Chicago, it also covers the roughly 225 metropolitan towns and cities that encircle the city out to a radius of about sixty miles from the Loop (Chicago’s downtown center). Its actual scope, however, is harder to state than that excellent principle of metropolitanism, because Chicago is a global intersection for people all over the world.

Despite the potentially unlimited subject, the Encyclopedia of Chicago is a wide-ranging, highly coherent work, covering such topics as the myriad immigrant populations in great detail. The editors of this work on a “city of neighborhoods” also commissioned detailed entries organized by Chicago’s unusual system of seventy-seven “community areas,” established by University of Chicago sociologists in the 1920s and widely recognized ever since (it is unusual because few great cities have a clear system). Each community area entry has a thumbnail map clearly indicating its location in the metropolis and supplies a uniformly formatted demographic table covering the years 1930—2000. Such comprehensive coverage shows both how the editors are true successors of the Chicago School of urban sociologists and how they have carefully built on the mountain of prior research produced by that school.

Does the online edition offer significant advantages over the print version? The print version runs 1,117 pages; the electronic version cannot be given a similar figure, but, as far as this reviewer could determine, the number and length of the entries are the same. The most important difference is one of availability: the online version is free to the entire world, making it far more available than the print version. Although meticulously hyperlinked, enabling readers to instantly explore related topics, the same cross-reference terms are highlighted in the print version, and turning pages is not a big inconvenience. And, although the online edition has some special navigational features, the basic structure of the electronic edition is limited to the alphabetical schema of the print edition.

The most powerful and substantive difference between the print and electronic editions lies in the interactive presentation of maps and “Historical Sources” (mostly graphic arts and photographs, but also manuscript and print sources). In the print version, they serve mostly as illustrations and are rarely large enough to reveal much detail. In the online edition, however, those artifacts become usable archival sources, presented via a consistent, intuitive, and reasonably fast image inspector that zooms, pans, and rotates. That advantage is a clear payoff to the investment in digital publishing. Michael Conzen, the cartographic editor, deserves great credit for the extraordinary original cartography that enriches both the print and online editions. Readers unfamiliar with urban scholarship may not be aware of the labor each map represents, uniting data from disparate sources, including maps of widely different scales and dates of origin, into a single cartographic design. The resulting maps are uniformly legible and are comparable across a wide range of subjects.

There are some limitations to the online Encyclopedia of Chicago, some of which would not be difficult to rectify in future revisions. Above all, it fails to take advantage of the digital medium’s powerful new ways to organize knowledge and instead mimics the print version’s standard alphabetical structure. Alphabetical adjacency is workable and familiar, but since almost nothing in the world takes place in alphabetical order, it is hardly worth preserving when new genres enable alternatives. Readers of encyclopedias do not know what they do not know, so we should use our tools to help them discover that which is most useful to them. The keyword search—a familiar online tool—is not necessarily better than the fine index in the printed version. Absent a subject-based or hierarchical classification scheme for the entries, it merely scrapes together all entries containing the keyword.

Another limitation of both the print and online editions is the absence of entries on individuals. Even an individual as important as Jane Addams does not have her own entry. Instead, the editors commissioned a “Biographical Dictionary,” compiled by Christina A. Reynan, covering more than two thousand significant individuals, with minimum (but precise) information on each: “Addams, Jane. b Sept. 6, 1860, Cedarville, IL; d May 21, 1935, Chicago. Social reformer; founded Hull House; won Nobel Peace Prize (1931).” A search of “Addams” in the online version yields seventy-three items, which, collectively, detail Addams’s involvement or leadership in a host of issues, events, and institutions. But without subject terms or a longer life-history-style entry (such at the those included in the Encyclopedia of New York City), the readers’ ability to sift through all those fragments of Addams’s life is severely limited.

The Encyclopedia of Chicago is a superb scholarly resource, setting a high standard for reference works on the Internet. It provides full source documentation on every entry and artifact, and does not allow external links, so every particle of content is attributable to the authors, editors, and publishers. But the publishers have stopped short of their duty. They do not provide students and scholars with a “how to cite” guide, and there are two versions of the title on the home page (with and without the word, “Electronic”).

Overall, the online Encyclopedia of Chicago is far more voluminous, comprehensive, and coherent than the current “Chicago” entry in the fast-growing Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago), but in today’s fast-changing online environment, the editors of future revisions should pay close attention to the many possibilities for enriching this fine work with linked databases created by universities and other reliable institutions, alternate structures of presentation, and options for user feedback. In its first version, the online Encyclopedia of Chicago risks being overshadowed by resources that take greater advantage of the electronic medium.

Philip J. Ethington
University of Southern California
Los Angeles, California