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title subtitle chapter URL author editor publisher type
Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities
Concepts, Models, and Experiments
Access
keywords/access.md
family given
Rohrbach
Augusta
family given
Gold
Matthew K.
Modern Language Association
book

Authorship

Augusta Rohrbach

Tufts University

Publication Status:

CURATORIAL STATEMENT

Issues of authorship emerge when teaching literature in a digital context. These issues are made more complex as the gateways to publication have seemingly swung open in a web 2.0 context. Though anyone can be an “author” by producing text, the term is deeply embedded in a matrix of historical, cultural, political, and social norms that since the 18th century, have a particular cache attached to publication, making it the sine qua non of authorship. In turn, this history of authorship and the 18th century consolidation of the idea of the author has been used as a foundation for an elitist educational model in which canonical texts —predominately produced by white males—formed the basis of knowledge, giving rise to a pedagogy of authority and expertise, where the student must learn what the author doth say (Freire).

Digital tools make possible a pedagogy informed by the knowledge that authorship is an arena that is as politically fraught as any other human endeavor. Indeed, countless examples might be called upon to tell stories as troubled and complex as culture itself. The artifacts for this keyword entry help illuminate why there’s more to be done than just “googling” the author—important as that first step can be. A quick internet search on Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, for instance, identifies her living a “literary life” but also notes that she remained “unpublished.” Robert Dale Parker’s 2008 edition of her work provides a corrective to the notion that she was “unpublished,” including a thick history of her writings comprised of the many versions of the work that were absorbed into the ethnographic research of her spouse John Rowe Schoolcraft. To complement the important literary history that Parker’s edition provides, it is useful to turn to web tools to grapple with the history of Native American culture and orality that is hidden by western norms of authorship and the linear history of publication. For that, readers can turn to web-enhanced sources such as the Gibagadinamaagoom website that manifests Ojibwa cultural history in its presentation.

What the artifacts included here highlight is that though the idea of the author seems as elemental as air itself, it has a history of conflict built into its very core. In other words, now that authorship is available to an unprecedented number of people and dissemination of text for a public can be constituted by something as simple as the 148 character “tweet,” the lack of barriers to publication made possible by Web 2.0 technologies does not signal the new era as one of “post-authorism.” Just because anyone might be a click away from contributing to the production of a public text, and are slated to join the ranks of authors archived in the US Library of Congress (McGill), finding ways to illuminate—and appreciate—not just the obstacles to publication but also the elements of textual production and the cultural conditions that shape ideas remains an important part of the work we do in a literature classroom enabled by digital tools. Just as important will also be the need to understand that norms—then and now—pervade how we read and think about authors.Though much may have changed in terms of the routes authors take to share their ideas, the pedagogical imperative to peel back the layers of authorship remains the same.

Principles of Artifact Selection:

The selection of artifacts below explore the shifts from the author—and the idea of authorship—from its early days of collective transcription and anonymous publication to the cult of personality and then to the notion that an author and the work are embedded in a complex web of social forces and even computational/algorithmic authorship. On the one hand the author can serve as a good starting place to understand and question cultural concepts of genius and creativity through two of the websites featured here. At one end of the spectrum is the website What Jane Saw; it presents homages to Shakespeare and Josuha Reynolds to help users track the development of the genius model that defines modern concepts of authorship. At the other end of the spectrum is the radical insistence on the continuity of thought and tribal knowledge by the Gibagadinamaagoom website. To bring the historical condition, production, and context of texts into view, two archiving tools have been selected for the way they expose the complexities of access from the perspective of translation (Persieds) and transcription (Transcribe Betham). Finally, the assignments around modes of collective authoring ask students to negotiate the myriad of terms and conditions that the genius model of authorship obscure and/or downright deny, modeling a degree of intellectual honesty and requiring a communally sanctioned idea of use-value. In the end, all of these artifacts do for authorship what intersectionality has done for feminism. They help us see, appreciate, and sometimes even experience, authorship as more than a monolithic concept or brand. Rather, engagement with materials such as these illuminate author/authorship as a multifaceted, multitudinous, fractured, fragmented, conflicted, counterintuitive state—a product of (im)pure artifice.

CURATED ARTIFACTS

Commonplace Book Assignment

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As with many of the other keyword entries included in this collection, the common-placing assignment offers an entryway to the concept. Vimala Pasupathi’s version was chosen because it emphasizes the author’s curatorial role of selection and arrangement. It asks students to “assemble” an author and thus stresses their own role in the construction of authorship and demonstrates, in both a literal and physical way, that readers construct authors and their works. It is also helpful that this activity tracks neatly with activities students are already engaged in through pinterest, instagram, and others. At the same time, the assignment attends to the importance of attribution. The prompt takes care to distinguish between practices of the past and how they treat authorship—as fluid, composite and potentially unattributed—and today’s classroom conventions as tied to a particular idea of the author as a stable entity whose work should be recognized as external to personal commonplacing/reading.

Persieds Tool

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  • Artifact Type: Tool
  • Source URL: http://www.perseids.org/
  • Copy of Artifact:
  • Creator: Marie-Claire Beaulieu; Tufts University

As a tool to facilitate and archive the transcription of ancient Greek and Latin texts, Persieds removes significant barriers to understanding ancient texts by allowing users of all skill sets entry into this early world of textual production. Much like the popular Wikipedia assignments used to teach collective authorship, this platform allows students to actively engage in the work of authorship—according to the standards in place before the 18th century conception of the single author/artist/genius. Users translate and edit texts, producing “micro-publications” that are immediately available on the site and become a permanent part of the archive. Creating an assignment using Persieds where students use it to translate a text and archive it will denaturalize conventional notions of authorship while also offering a look into texts of the ancient world that circulated orally and might better be called “attributed” rather than authored.

Transcribe Bentham

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Transcribe Bentham also uses the crowdsourcing method. Inviting participants to take up transcription as an “exciting opportunity to make a genuine difference to research and scholarship by contributing to the production of the new edition of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, and to help create for posterity a vast digital repository of Bentham’s writings.” Transcribe Bentham holds the same principles of participation as Persieds, assuring those who wish to take part that “no special skills are required” nor must anyone be approved to participate, and, best of all: “every contribution—no matter how small—is of great value to Transcribe Bentham.” But where Persieds allows contributors to negotiate what may be a language deficit, contributors to Transcribe Bentham experience authorship as act of a human hand. In order to contribute to the edition, participants must interpret the handwriting in the physical text—a feature of authorship that has been largely eclipsed by digital modes of publication. Like assignments that ask students to write on clay or read by candlelight to manifest experiences of earlier periods, this tool and archive will engage students in an earlier form of authorship—one that our shift to the keyboard is fast occluding.

What Jane Saw

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  • Artifact Type: Website
  • Source URL: http://www.whatjanesaw.org/
  • Copy of Artifact:
  • Creator: Janine Barchas, University of Texas at Austin

What Jane Saw offers a view into “what were the world’s first types of “single-author” shows, or exhibitions dedicated to a single person’s artistic genius,” according to Janine Barchas, the website’s builder. Her free and open website provides a look at Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery-- the first museum dedicated to the work of William Shakespeare, and the Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792) retrospective at the British Institution in 1813. Barchas explained that “prior to these two spectacles (admittedly very different in kind), public art exhibitions had never circled around the work of a single person. This website helps students see how recent the concept of single-author, the “famous author/artist,” is as a construction even though it has become a norm in the art world epitomized by retrospectives on Picasso or Kara Walker and in terms of authors like Austen or Dickinson. Authors—like artists—become brands in a cultural marketplace; being able to recognize them also means being able to commodify them. This website helps its users get “behind” Austen’s texts and into her world and see the ways that the genius model of authorship was constructed.

Collective Authorship Assignment

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To help students occupy the space of the author, it is helpful to mirror the complex web of agents involved in the production of any text using the social context of the classroom. Danica Savonick takes the practice of collective authorship in her “Introduction to Narrative” and flips the script proposed by the commonplacing assignment discussed earlier. Here students are asked to produce a collective text and as such, approach authorship as composed of multiple approaches and consciousnesses where each individual must find a place within a constructed whole. The specific attention to media selection will sharpen students’ awareness of how formal choices shape the reception of content and requiring multiple media will encourage comparison among and between media and imagined purposes. This assignment will help bring the formal production elements of authorship into contact with the message (McLuhan).

Digital Edition

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The literary classroom is a site where students can become scholars by using web sources to reveal the textual histories of authorship through structural design—or what Matthew Kirschebaum calls the “mechanism.” Contemporary authors like William Gibson have reinjected the impact of time on publication as it is recorded in the edition by publishing born-digital texts such as Agrippa that mutate over time or even disappear, giving the lie to the author/artist as a neat singularity, an individual and discreet agent producing an original text, regardless of any legal apparatus. To help students explore the temporal conditions of textual production as it manifested in a pre-digital context use John Bryant’s web-based electronic edition of Herman Melville’s Typee. This edition of Melville’s text highlights how porous authorship can be, even when its author is well-known, using its multiple revisions and editions, published in the United States and England. Comparing these editions helps students understand the complex web of agency over time, publishers, and editions. It is an excellent example of how authorship is shaped by what publishers believe the reader will tolerate more than the author’s “vision.” Students will see how Melville is pitted against the conventions of taste, offering a view of the combative nature of publication and the inevitable role that market plays in how such decisions are made. Use this edition to challenge expectations about what it means to produce an intergrated and unified text located in time, place, and nation. This source can be used as a template for an assignment that asks students to become authors and scholars of multimedia editions of their own choosing using the kind of “design thinking” that is elemental to versioning (Kelley).

Stylometrics Assignment

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And just when it seems as if author/ship eludes definition, you might wish to confound that impulse by throwing in Bill Campbell’s stylometry assignment to identify key stylistic features of a work. By circumscribing authorship to a matter of style, students can try on authorial identities as a shape-shifting experiment with their own writing. An interesting side-feature of this assignment, other than offering a chance to play with this program, is the way elemental terms—such as “dictionary”—are reframed in this context according to the program’s method of finding core values that characterize a work. The top 50 most common words, in this case, will characterize the work of an author, and help distinguish one person’s work—or brand-- from another. By breaking down the work of art to a series of stylistic word choices, this assignment will let students explore authorial identity as untethered to personal identity. In addition, consider pairing this assignment with theories of machine reading as an analytic tool such as Franco Moretti’s Distant Reading.

Authorship Syllabus

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For a way into the legal aspects of authorship across history and disciplines, take a look at Martha Woodmansee’s syllabus for “Intellectual Property and the Construction of Authorship.”

This course provides a broad view of the issues in historical context, and also recognizes that standards vary across disciplines. Especially useful is the overall emphasis on the debates surrounding authorship through the inclusion of case law. The “Authorship in Science” section calls attention to important differences in how and what makes an author in scientific publication, the importance of collaboration, and the use of citation as a form of authorship and retains the focus on forms of author/ship as mostly divergent in its practices and values. Readers may want to select material from this syllabus to build a unit on the way the law has operated to shape authorship.

Gibagadinamaagoom website

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The provenance with authorship is complicated by both the practices and the politics of the Gibagadinamaagoom website. Use this website to unpack the history of authorship in the Ojibwa oral tradition—work that can be generalized to understand orality more broadly and the colonizing impact of print. The site represents a cooperative effort to preserving and protecting tribal beliefs and sanctioned modalities in that is was funded by NEH and constructed in cooperation with tribal members. Visitors to this site will learn that “the Ojibwa would not designate a story passed down through the generations as having an author.  The story would be owned communally.  In some cases, they would be owned by the Midewiwin (‘Grand Medicine Society’), in which case they should not be made publicly available” (Powell, 2017). The website features web-enabled multimodal presentations to help users see beyond what Timothy Powell and Larry Aiken call “the margins of the white page” by placing an emphasis on the aural presentations (252). Eschewing static descriptions, the emphasis is on presence and process as elders are filmed explaining and demonstrating tribal practices, teaching the native language, and keeping traditions alive through active practice. The Ojibwa beliefs and practices made present through the website represent more than a mere alignment with many of the characteristic efficacies present in a multimodal digital environment (Powell and Aiken). The Gibagadinamaagoom website provides a deep cultural and philosophical background for the models of authorship now available through Web 2.0 tools (Cohen). Use this site as a resource to help students rethink authorship as a communal practice outside of writing.

What is Digital Writing Podcast

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Whitney Trettlen’s podcast on digital writing expands the meaning of authorship to make listeners aware of how varied the uses and purposes of writing can be in the digital context. Put together as a series of interviews, speakers explore the more granular elements of making meaning using digital tools to remix, repurpose, and revise material that is freely available on the web while also preserving the norms of attribution. Use this as a primer for other assignments and also as a prompt for dialogue around questions of how dynamic authorship is when the boundaries between reader and writer no longer hold.

RELATED MATERIALS

Aitken, Larry. Larry Aitken on Traditional Knowledge https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tvbu_oJPs-Y&feature=youtu.be (accessed 9/16/2017)

Batker, Carol, Eden Osucha, and Augusta Rohrbach. Critical Pedagogies for a Changing World. American Literature. 89, no. 2, (June 2017).

DeSpain, Jessica and Jennifer Travis, eds. Digital Humanities Pedagogy and the Long Nineteenth Century. University of Illinois Press, forthcoming.

Powell, Timothy. “Digital Knowledge Sharing: Forging Partnerships between Scholars, Archives, and Indigenous Communities.” https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/mar/article/view/20269 (accessed 9/16/2017) http://historyoftexttechnologies.blogspot.com/2014/01/beowulf-in-hundred-tweets-beow100.html.

https://www.tumblr.com/tagged/this-bridge-called-my-back

Whitson, Roger. “There Is No William Blake: @autoblake’s Algorithmic Condition.” Essays in Romanticism, vol 23, issue 1. http://online.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/abs/10.3828/eir.2016.23.1.10 (accessed 9/16/2017)

WORKS CITED

Barchus, Janine. Email communication, 8/24/16.

Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” Image/Music/Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. 142-7.

Campbell, Bill. Stylometrics Assignment. http://cs108-fall14.wikispaces.umb.edu/Assignment+5+Stylometrics Cohen, Matt. Networked New England. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 2010.

Foucault, Michel. “What is an Author?” Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Ed. Donald F.Bouchard. Ithaca: CUP, 1977. 113-138

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Seabury Press, 1968.

Gibson, William. Agrippa: A Book of the Dead. New York: Kevin Begos Publishing, 1992. Available online—everywhere.

Kelley, Wyn. “Melville By Design,” Digital Humanities Pedagogy and the Long Nineteenth Century. Jessica DeSpain and Jennifer Travis, eds. University of Illinois Press, forthcoming.

Harris, Katherine. “Play, Collaborate, Break, Build Share: ‘Screwing Around’ in Digital Pedagogy, The Debate to Define Digital Humanities Again.” Polymath: An Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences Journal, 3, no. 3 (2013), https://ojcs.siue.edu/ojs/index.php/polymath/article/view/2853/0

Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008.

McGill, Andrew. “Can Twitter Fit Inside the Library of Congress? The Atlantic, (8/4/2105). http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/08/can-twitter-fit-inside-the-library-of-congress/494339/?utm_source=eb (accessed 12/23/16)

McLuhan, Marshall. The Medium is the Message. New York: Penguin, 1967.

Moretti, Franco. Distant Reading. New York: Verso, 2013

Pasupathi, Vimala. Commonplace Book Assignment. https://vcpasupathi.wordpress.com/

Powell, Timothy and Larry P. Aitken, chi-ayy ya agg, (Wisdom Keeper). “Encoding Culture: Building a Digital Archive Based on Traditional Ojibwe Codes of Conduct,” in The American Literature Scholar in the Digital Age, Amy E. Earhart and Andrew Jewll, eds. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010). http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?cc=etlc;c=etlc;idno=9362034.0001.001;rgn=full%20text;view=toc;xc=1;g=dculture (accessed 12/23/2016).

Powell, Timothy. Email communication 9/11/2017.

Savonick, Danica. Collective Authorship Assignment. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1F9p05hOh63O4MkY0ClJg_asyG_34cYYVFsef0WfaWZ0/edit](https://docs.google.com/document/d/

Schoolcraft, Jane Johnston. The Sound the Stars Make Rushing Through the Sky: The Writings of Jane Johnston Schoolcraft. Edited by Robert Dale Parker. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.

Trettien, Whitney Ann.”What is Digital Writing?” Podcast. https://soundcloud.com/thompson-writing-program/what-is-digital-writing

Woodmansee, Martha. Authorship Syllabus. http://www.case.edu/affil/sce/authorship/index.html?nw_view=1473195030