This seminar surveys some of the best and most interesting of the very recent scholarship onthree interlinked areas that are responding to technological changes in writing technologies — authorship, curation, and copyright — in order to better understand how writers are responding to profound shifts in writing technologies and writing spaces. In keeping with the topic of the class, students will be encouraged to pursue capstone projects that take advantage of the opportunities afforded by internetworked digital tools and composing spaces. Readings will include Krista Kennedy’s Textual Curation, Amy Robillard and Ron Fortune’s Authorship Contested, selections from The Routledge Handbook of Digital Writing and Rhetoric, edited by Jonathan Alexander and Jacqueline Rhodes, and a sneak preview of a forthcoming special issue of Kairos on Ownership, Authorship, and Copyright.
These texts illustrate how 21st Century internetworked digital tools are often dependent on the use of high-speed connections to the Internet to construct cloud-based simulacra of the physical drives and other writing spaces that we once understood to lie “within” our computers. Writers using — for example — Google’s Chromebooks have little "internal" space to work with. Rather, their work occurs not so much on their laps, or desks, but rather in the server spaces assigned to their particular machines. Given this new technological structure, writers have never been so distant from their own work. Ironically, the work of other writers has never been "closer" than it is to contemporary composers who typically navigate around e-mail, instant messages, and an ever-expanding pool of freely available texts in order to write. Simply put, the relationships among composers, audiences, and texts are responding to this new technological circumstance. Pursuing the implications of these new composing spaces will be our project for this semester.