The Web of Knowledge: Authority, Encyclopedias, and Power in the Digital Age

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Book cover for The Web of Knowledge: Encylopedias and Authority in the Digital Age by Dr Giota Alevizou

Join us for a book launch event for Giota Alevizou’s The Web of Knowledge: Encyclopedias and Authority in the Digital Age.

Who gets to define knowledge today?

From Britannica and Wikipedia to search and AI answer engines that quietly depend on encyclopedic logics, this book traces how authority is produced, negotiated, and contested across digital infrastructures. Rather than treating encyclopedias as neutral reference tools or relics of the past, Giota Alevizou reframes them as media infrastructures: historically layered, politically charged, and deeply entangled with platform power, expertise, and trustworthiness.

Drawing on media studies, science and technology studies, and digital humanities, The Web of Knowledge offers a genealogy of encyclopedic authority that speaks directly to contemporary debates about AI, platform governance, and the future of collective knowledge. It is a book about encyclopedias — but also about the changing conditions under which knowledge becomes legitimate, credible, and governable in the digital age.

The evening will be a conversation about these matters. The author will be joined by Professor Emerita Robin Mansell and Professor Elena Simperl.

Copies of the books will be available, and refreshments will be provided.

Speakers:

Giota Alevizou

Giota Alevizou is a Lecturer in Digital Humanities and Culture, and Co-director of the Digital Futures MA programme. Her work examines civic media, encyclopedias, platforms, and emerging AI systems as sites where authority, expertise, and trust are produced and contested. She has published widely on a range of topics in digital culture, the politics of technology, and the histories and futures of digital commons; She is the author of The Web of Knowledge: encyclopedias and authority in the digital age (Polity, 2026) and co-author in of The Creative Citizen UnBound (Policy Press, 2016).

Robin Mansell

Robin Mansell is Professor Emerita at the Department of Media and Communications, LSE. Her research focuses on power, governance, and inequality in digital transformations. She has published extensively on the political economy of communication and digital infrastructures. Her latest co-authored book, Information Ecosystems and Troubled Democracy, is a critical and global assessment of how media, AI and data governance enable or disable democratic practice.

Elena Simperl

Elena Simperl is Professor of Computer Science at King’s College London, a co-director of the King's Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and Director of Research at the Open Data Institute. Elena has worked extensively on knowledge graphs, semantic technologies, and human–AI collaboration. Her research bridges technical innovation and societal impact, with a focus on data, AI governance, and distributed artificial intelligence. Elena co-chairs the Croissant working group in ML Commons, developing an open standard to improve data portability, discovery and use in AI. She is the president of the Semantic Web Science Association.