Authorship: Digital and Database

Digital AspectsCCR 747 ::: S13

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Collin Brooke

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I assume this scholar needs little

introduction.

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solitude

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material aspects

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...anyone can be an author, if the understanding of publishing is limited to the admittedly narrow criterion of “making public.” ... Anyone can be an author, but not everyone can be an Author. (93)

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authoring metadata (95-97)

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readers writing the text

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In these various screen-based textualities, authorship is less a matter of asserting a thesis or a plot than it is of providing a range of possibilities. In this way, the act of reading becomes more akin to actualization (and choice) rather than simple consumption. Correspondingly, the author of such text is responsible for a range of possibilities, a range that might be judged according to variety or flexibility instead of clarity, brevity, or sincerity. And texts themselves are performed processes of interactions rather than objects. (98)

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Jessica ReymanAssociate ProfessorNorthern Illinois University

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user-generated metadata

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User data, then, is not seen as created by an author-user, but rather as a by-product of technological algorithms and aggregation formulas. The means, terms, and applications of user contributions are not controlled by the authors of those contributions, but by technology companies that seek to harness them for commercial ends... Current data-mining practices prevent author-users from controlling the creation, distribution, and uses of their work. ...

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The data itself isn’t viewed as the result of human creativity or effort. Technology companies and data brokers, in this sense, are taking something that has little or no value as separate, individual data points and creating something of commercial value by aggregating and interpreting it. Such appropriation is based on the assumptions that data as property is separable and unique from individual users’ creative activities on the social and participatory web and further that data is a technology-generated by product. As authorless objects, the argument goes, data has little value until it is aggregated and transformed into massive data sets and applied toward target marketing and customization of services (524)

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Feist Publications vs Rural Telephone

(data vs content)

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Understanding data as objective facts, and, further, as unowned property, works to remove users from a creative role in its production. What such a distinction neglects to address, however, is that user data is a form of user contribution that is inextricably bound to an author-user’s content creations: the generation of data is tied--by user, time, activity, and technology--to the production of content, and vice versa (525).

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