Late to the E-Party? Academics and the Reshaping of Author/ity

• In Event: Lone Scholar as “Not Enough”: The (Im)possibility of Authorship in Postmodern Research

Abstract

Purpose
The lone scholar writing a single-authored work is an enduring notion within the humanities and social sciences where scholarship is linked to writing craft (Cronin, 2003). This presentation argues that 21st century socially-mediated technological practices render the lone scholar obsolete, creating possibilities for multi-platformed, multi-authored academic work that increases participation and establishes conditions for more lively, scrutinized, rigorous, and responsive scholarship.

Theoretical framework
Critics argue that the lone scholar construct and its outcome, the single-authored publication, are problematic renderings that obscure the complex, collaborative, and political work of universities (Richardson, 1996) and limit what knowledge can be produced and who can produce it (Author, 2010). Traditional forms of academic text and research serve as tropes, unexamined until challenged by new constructions. Morgan (2000) interrogated the perceived stability of academic texts where meaning is created by the fixed structure of the text; similarly, Glazier (2002) recognized changes where writing becomes “less a matter of canonical ‘laying down the law’ and more of a dance between the possibilities of representation” (p. 15). If what “writing is becomes altered by how it is physically written through its production technology” (Glazier, 2002, p. 4), then the scholar’s work is altered by the change in media. The technology of print shaped the single-authored text; 21st century technologies are reshaping the possibilities of text and the author/ity of the scholar.

Modes of inquiry and data sources
The following question informed our inquiry: How do composition practices influenced by common uses of digital technology disrupt the notion of single authorship? For data, we selected examples of multi-platform e-texts “where integral elements…get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated” product (Jenkins, 2007). We analyzed the texts for incidents of single and multiple authorship, including instances where 1) online readers co-opted originating texts and inserted themselves as co-authors without expressed permission; 2) writers designed texts to allow reader interaction, including co-authorship. In addition, we investigated examples of academic writing employing attributes of multi-platform texts as early indicators of scholarly writing that disrupt humanistic constructs of single authorship.

Warrants for point of view
Data examination indicated ways in which digital authoring processes result in multi-authored texts. By expanding content across platforms, modes, and genres that require collaborative teams with varying technical and expressive expertise, and by materially blurring the lines between author/reader, writers and readers dismantle the single author.

Significance
Even as journals become more accessible online, academic writing remains governed by pre-21st century technologies dominated by print and paper publications. Digital and Web 2.0 technologies, which allow for interactive, dispersed, and multi-platform texts, push researchers to reconsider what constitutes academic texts and authorship. The idea of single-authored texts becomes nonsensical in digital environments in which words, video, sound, and animation are employed in works distributed across several formats. This presentation provides explicit examples of how authors and readers—in sanctioned and unsanctioned ways—collaborate in the construction of texts that increasingly affect scholarly practices, including the inscription of research.

Authors

• Teri J. Holbrook, Georgia State University

• Melanie Hundley, Vanderbilt University