{"id":86,"date":"2015-03-27T15:51:54","date_gmt":"2015-03-27T15:51:54","guid":{"rendered":"\/section-1-authorship\/chapter-3-the-perseverance-of-print-based-authorship-within-humanities-scholarship\/notes-chapter-3\/"},"modified":"2015-03-27T15:51:54","modified_gmt":"2015-03-27T15:51:54","slug":"notes-chapter-3","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/commentpress.openreflections.org\/?page_id=86","title":{"rendered":"Notes Chapter 3"},"content":{"rendered":"

[1] A questioning of authorship\u2019s humanist legacy does not necessarily need to be a distancing of humanism. Authorship\u2019s humanist history already provides the seed for a radical self-critique, where an inherent post-<\/em>humanist authorship has, as can be argued, always already been a part of its proclaimed \\’otherness\\’. The question is then how we can aid in a practical posthumanist critique of authorship\u2019s humanist notions, if we see posthumanism as \\’humanism\\’s ongoing deconstruction\\’ (Badmington 2000:\u00a09\u201310, Herbrechter 2013).<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Barthes did however experiment with a different \u2018language\u2019, a different style of writing, in his novel Lover\u2019s Discourse: Fragments<\/em>, published in 1977. Foucault has discussed anonymous authorship in his writings (among others in his essay \u2018What is an author?\u2019 (1977:\u00a0383) and in his interviews. He has also conducted an anonymous interview with Christian Delacampagne for the French newspaper Le Monde<\/em>, in which he states: \u2018Why did I suggest that we use anonymity? Out of nostalgia for a time when, being quite unknown, what I said had some chance of being heard. With the potential reader, the surface of contact was unrippled. The effects of the book might land in unexpected places and form shapes that I had never thought of. A name makes reading too easy\u2019 (Foucault 1990:\u00a0323\u2013324). He also expressed his disappointment with the fact that, due to his fame and the immense popularity of his Coll\u00e8ge de France seminars, he couldn\u2019t discuss and develop his work in-progress further in a more interactive and collaborative (and less one-dimensional) setting (Foucault 2003:\u00a01\u20133).<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Ted Nelson coined the term hypertext in the early 1960s.<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> For the difference in the way authorship is constructed and functions within biomedicine and HEP, for instance, see Cronin (2001).<\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> See for an extensive overview of collaboration in the (digital) humanities see Spiro (2009) http:\/\/digitalscholarship.wordpress.com\/2009\/06\/01\/examples-of-collaborative-digital-humanities-projects\/<\/a>.<\/p>\n

[6]<\/a> As Bethany Nowviskie describes it: \u2018Alt-ac is the neologism and singularly-awkward Twitter hashtag we use to mark conversations about \\”alternative academic\\” careers for humanities scholars. Here, \\”alternative\\” typically denotes neither adjunct teaching positions nor wholly non-academic jobs\u2019 (2011a:\u00a07).<\/p>\n

[7]<\/a> On the development of this image and the continued importance of the myth of the lone genius and creativity in present day culture, see Montuori and Purser (1995).<\/p>\n

[8]<\/a> For a survey of social media use in research, see Rowlands et al. (2011).<\/p>\n

[9]<\/a> See: http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Reliability_of_Wikipedia#Expert_opinion<\/a><\/p>\n

[10]<\/a> Similarly David Berry (2008:\u00a042) and James Boyle (2009) have argued that contemporary authorship and related notions of \u2018creativity\u2019 are being \u2018reconfigured to meet the needs of capital\u2019.<\/p>\n

[11]<\/a> It would be interesting to extend this analysis to the academic publishing industry, and the role authorship plays here in commodification processes, something I touched upon earlier but will not discuss further in this context.<\/p>\n

[12]<\/a> For an overview of this controversy and the ensuing debate see: http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Reliability_of_Wikipedia#Comparative_studies<\/a><\/p>\n

[13]<\/a> See: http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Wiki_etiquette<\/a><\/p>\n

[14]<\/a> For more on Jimmy Wales push towards a flagged revisions moderation system, see: http:\/\/bits.blogs.nytimes.com\/2009\/01\/23\/wikipedia-may-restrict-publics-ability-to-change-entries\/<\/a><\/p>\n

[15]<\/a> See: http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/<\/a> and http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/about\/cc0<\/a><\/p>\n

[16]<\/a> See for instance: http:\/\/www.pewsocialtrends.org\/2011\/08\/28\/the-digital-revolution-and-higher-education\/2\/<\/p>\n

[17]<\/a> In Uncreative Writing<\/em> Goldsmith lists projects that have engaged with what in other circles or contexts might be seen as plagiarism:<\/p>\n

\n

Over the past five years we have seen works such as a retyping of Jack Kerouac\u2019s On the Road<\/em> in its entirety, a page a day, every day, on a blog for a year; an appropriation of the complete text of a day\u2019s copy of the New York Times<\/em> published as a nine-hundred-page book; a list poem that is nothing more than reframing a listing of stores from a shopping mall directory into a poetic form; an impoverished writer who has taken every credit card application sent to him and bound them into an eight-hundred-page print-on-demand book so costly that even he can\u2019t afford a copy; a poet who has parsed the text of an entire nineteenth-century book on grammar according to its own methods, even down to the book\u2019s index; a lawyer who re-presents the legal briefs of her day job as poetry in their entirety without changing a word; another writer who spends her days at the British Library copying down the first verse of Dante\u2019s Inferno<\/em> from every English translation that the library possesses, one after another, page after page, until she exhausts the library\u2019s supply; a writing team who scoops status updates off social networking sites and assigns them to names of deceased writers (\u2018Jonathan Swift has got tix to the Wranglers game tonight\u2019), creating an epic, never-ending work of poetry that rewrites itself as frequently as Facebook pages are updated; and an entire movement of writing, called Flarf, that is based on grabbing the worst of Google search results: The more offensive, the more ridiculous, the more outrageous the better. (2011b:\u00a03)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

[18]<\/a> Although it was actually Geoffrey Gatza, the editor of Day<\/em>\u2019s publisher BlazeVox Books<\/em>, who made the book, according to the production video that accompanied the publication, and Johnson retracted his claims to authorship and originality of Day<\/em> as a work completely. As reviewer Bill Freind writes in a review of Day<\/em> in Jacket Magazine<\/em>: \u201cIn fact, Johnson emailed me to say: \u2018After viewing Geoffrey Gatza\u2019s video, I realized that Day<\/em> was no longer mine. I now fully disown my \u2018original\u2019 idea and separate myself completely from the book. Day<\/em> now belongs to Geoffrey Gatza.\u2019 However, Gatza himself doesn\u2019t seem particularly eager to claim ownership of the text, since BlazeVox Books<\/em> has a special Goldsmith-to-Johnson conversion kit. It\u2019s a free PDF file that includes the fake jacket blurbs and Johnson\u2019s name that you can download here\u201d (Freind 2010).<\/p>\n

[19]<\/a> Google Poetics consists of poems based on Google autocomplete suggestions. See: http:\/\/www.googlepoetics.com\/post\/35060155182\/info<\/a>; Flarf poetry has been described as the \u2018heavy usage of Google search results in the creation of poems\u2019. See: http:\/\/www.poets.org\/poetsorg\/text\/brief-guide-flarf-poetry<\/a>; The Postmodernism Generator is a computer program which automatically creates random \u2018postmodernist essays\u2019, written by Andrew. C. Bulhak, using the Dada Engine. See: http:\/\/www.elsewhere.org\/pomo\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[1] A questioning of authorship\u2019s humanist legacy does not necessarily need to be a distancing of humanism. Authorship\u2019s humanist history already provides the seed for a radical self-critique, where an inherent post-humanist authorship has, as can be argued, always already been a part of its proclaimed \\’otherness\\’. The question is then how we can aid […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":72,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-86","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry","post","clearfix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/commentpress.openreflections.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/86","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/commentpress.openreflections.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/commentpress.openreflections.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commentpress.openreflections.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commentpress.openreflections.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=86"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/commentpress.openreflections.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/86\/revisions"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commentpress.openreflections.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/72"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/commentpress.openreflections.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=86"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}