Gypsysavage’s Weblog

If we think of collaboration as an assembly-line or segmentation model of working together, as George P. Landow puts it, in which any number of people contribute to a piece of writing over a period of time, then authorship becomes an issue of acknowledgment. What else could it be? We live in a society where authorial credit for an endeavor is currency. Authorship, especially in the humanities, gives us a sense of meaning, as well as legal and professional benefits.

But with hypertext, it is common to think that collaborative writing takes the place of individual achievement, which can be translated in some circles as the death of the byline.

But let us think about this as simply as possible: what happened to the authorship of a book before the advent of hypertext? The author conceived of the ideas of a novel and then translated them into words. Regardless of how many previous authors this person borrowed from to form his ideas, the placement and order of the words in the novel are (hopefully) his and his alone, giving him sole authorship of their arrangement and its interpretive meaning. The mere act of “borrowing”, however, can be defined as part of this ongoing collaboration, but the end product was the novel, a material object of financial and intrinsic value.

Joint intellectual efforts come later, as scholars and publishers evaluate the novel and offer up their criticisms and explications, usually in the form of footnotes, which is still part of the assembly-line. Take a look at any of Nietzsche’s books edited by Walter Kaufmann; his cerebral footnotes dwarf the original text (usually to the reader’s chagrin), but Nietzsche is still credited with its authorship.

The reader in this case is active, and for their own benefit they interpret the words on the page, both Kaufmann’s and Neitzsche’s. This joint venture gives a broader scope of the subject matter, but the authorship still belongs with the originator of the material.

To lend credence to authorship is to acknowledge the existence of an original author, but what about hypertext and its effect on the author’s material? Is hypertext any different than fanciful footnoting? Many in my field are loath to think so.

Networked hypertext in which a document exists in relation to other documents does not necessarily negate authorship when taken as a whole. It’s a more organic process than an assembly-line-type collaboration, and places more value on the subject than the person who created it, certainly.

But the problem for me is this: just because I am part of the human race does not mean I must relinquish my individuality. Nor should a sole document as part of a hypertext network lose it authorial property. If this blog post is part of a hypertext, which it inherently is, the fact remains that I created this very part of it. On the other hand, I wouldn’t be an individual if it weren’t for the human race, nor would this blog post have existed if it weren’t for a hypertext network that allowed it to exist in the first place.

We shouldn’t look at hypertext as an “either/or” scenario: Either I created this document or it is part of a community of information. Why can’t it be both, a dichotomy of two equal values of authorship and collaboration?

Eventually, those in the humanities need to learn from those in the sciences, crediting an entire body of collaborative information while enjoying the fact that they had contributed to it in the first place. We need to get over ourselves without losing our Selves.