James Bridle’s twelve-volume set The Iraq War: A Historiography of Wikipedia Changelogs documents in nearly 7,000 pages all 12,000 changes made to the Wikipedia article on the Iraq War in five years between December 2004 and November 2009.

“It contains arguments over numbers, differences of opinion on relevance and political standpoints, and frequent moments when someone erases the whole thing and just writes ‘Saddam Hussein was a dickhead.’ This is historiography. This is what culture actually looks like: a process of argument, of dissenting and accreting opinion, of gradual and not always correct codification.

And for the first time in history, we’re building a system that, perhaps only for a brief time but certainly for the moment, is capable of recording every single one of those infinitely valuable pieces of information. Everything should have a history button. We need to talk about historiography, to surface this process, to challenge absolutist narratives of the past, and thus, those of the present and our future” (James Bridle, “On Wikipedia, Cultural Patrimony, and Historiography”).

Bridle explains the necessity of putting this web-based debate into book form by its vividness: on the one hand, its scope is impressive and surprising. At twelve hardcover volumes, it approaches “the size of a single old-style encyclopaedia.” On the other hand, “[p]hysical objects are useful props in debates like this: immediately illustrative, and useful to hang an argument and peoples’ attention on” (Ibid.).

The work was produced only once and is not publicly available. It was exhibited in galleries in the United States and Europe where, apparently, reading the books was not allowed: “Please do not touch. / excerpts of text can be found in blue binder on vitrine.” This shows that Bridle was less interested here in the distributive potential of print-on-demand than in the easy accessibility of the technology.