‘A Word Factory was wanted’: Organizational objectivity in the making of the Oxford English Dictionary

Abstract

In its application of the scientific methods, aims of comparative philology, and coordination among thousands of contributors spread around the globe, the production of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary was a remarkable organizational endeavor and an early model of large-scale collaborative knowledge production. Begun in 1857 and ending in 1928, the story of the dictionary’s making provides not only a glimpse into varied visions of intersubjective science at the time, but also the viable contingencies of their enactment. I argue that in order to smooth coordination among a heterogeneous set of actors, the organization of the dictionary’s production relied on standardized procedure and circuits of corroboration and deliberation. This set of strategies presents an organizational parallel to the procedural techniques and technologies increasingly called upon in the 19th century to mediate scientific observations and negate individual idiosyncrasies. However, the case also shows that appeals to impersonal procedure were rhetorically leveraged to establish legitimacy and attain resources. It can thus provide clues as to why a procedural sense of objectivity became elevated as an epistemic virtue and can also contribute to a more refined understanding of when and why appeals to impersonal procedure trump the trained judgment of expertise.