ABSTRACT
Digital recording methods, user-generated content and global connectivity – even if still unevenly distributed – are fundamentally changing the ways that information is created and distributed, not least in the broad genre of cultural and historical atlases. Static repositories of general knowledge such as printed atlases, dictionaries, encyclopedias, and other ‘reference books’, are being rapidly supplanted by sources on the web, sweeping with them the long-established structures for establishing the authority of content such as publisher’s imprint, author reputation, and book reviews. Community-based history projects and personal academic blogs nibble at the edges of academic writing, while the online publication of scholarly source data forces us to review existing methods of valuing academic output in the Humanities which has been based more on works of synthesis than on works of compilation. New terms have slipped into the vernacular – social networking, crowd-sourcing, folksonomies, tags, geotags, blogs, wikis, bookmarks, googling, and mashups – to describe new modes of information creation, discovery, and sharing which scarcely existed at the turn of the twenty-first century.
