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Digital Aspects
CCR 747 ::: S13

Wednesday, March 6, 13

Collin Brooke


I assume this scholar
needs little
introduction.


solitude


material aspects


...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)


authoring metadata (95-97)


readers writing the text


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)


Jessica Reyman
Associate Professor
Northern Illinois University


user-generated metadata


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. ...


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)


Feist Publications vs Rural Telephone
(data vs content)


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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