[ecrea] CfP author.net

*author.net*

/a cross-divisional conference on distributed authorship /

*UCLA, October 5th-6th 2018*

*Organizers:*

*Sean Gurd*, Professor of Classics, University of Missouri

*Francesca Martelli*, Assistant Professor of Classics, UCLA

DEADLINE FOR ABSTRACTS: January 15, 2018

Distributed authorship is a familiar concept in many fields of cultural 
production. Long associated with pre-modern cultures, it still serves as 
a mainstay for the study of Classical antiquity, which takes 'Homer' as 
its foundational point of orientation, and which, like many other 
disciplines in the humanities, has extended its insights into the 
open-endedness of oral and performance traditions into its study of 
textual dynamics as well. The rise of genetic criticism within textual 
studies bears witness to this urge to fray perceptions of the hermetic 
closure of the written, and to expose the multiple strands of 
collaboration and revision that a text may contain. And the increasingly 
widespread use of the multitext in literary editions of authors from 
Homer to Joyce offers a material manifestation of this impulse to 
display the multiple different levels and modes of distribution at work 
in the authorial process.In many areas of the humanities that rely on 
traditional textual media, then, the distributed author is alive and 
well, and remains a current object of study.

In recent years, however, the dynamic possibilities of distributed 
authorship have accelerated most rapidly in media associated with the 
digital domain, where modes of communication have rendered artistic 
creation increasingly collaborative, multi-local and open-ended. These 
developments have prompted important questions on the part of scholars 
who study these new media about the ontological status of the artistic, 
musical and literary objects that such modes of distribution (re)create. 
In musicology, for example, musical modes such as jazz improvisation and 
digital experimentation are shown to exploit the complex relay of 
creativity within and between the ever-expanding networks of artists and 
audiences involved in their production and reception, and construct 
themselves in ways that invite others to continue the process of their 
ongoing distribution. The impact of such artistic developments on the 
identity of 'the author' may be measured by developments in copyright 
law, such as the emergence of the Creative Commons, an organization that 
enables artists and authors to waive copyright restrictions on 
co-creators in order to facilitate their collaborative participation. 
And this mode of distribution has in turn prompted important questions 
about the orientation of knowledge and power in the collectives and 
publics that it creates.

This conference seeks to deepen and expand the theorising of authorial 
distribution in the digital domain, and to explore the insights that its 
operations in this sphere might lend into the mechanisms of authorial 
distribution at work in older (and, indeed, ancient) media. To this end, 
it will bring together scholars working in new media with scholars 
working across the humanities, in order to explore what kind of dialogue 
we might generate on the question of distributed authorship across these 
disciplinary (and other) divisions. Ultimately, our aim is to develop 
and refine a set of conceptual tools that will bring distributed 
authorship into a wider remit of familiarity; and to explore whether 
these tools are, in fact, unique to the new media that have inspired 
their most recent discursive formulation, or whether they have a range 
of application that extends beyond the digital domain.

We invite contributions from those who are engaged directly with the 
processes and media that are pushing and complicating ideas of 
distributed authorship in the world today, and also from those who are 
actively drawing on insights derived from these contemporary 
developments in their interpretation of the textual and artistic 
processes of the past, on the following topics (among others):

·The distinctive features of the new artistic genres and objects 
generated by modes of authorial distribution, from musical mashups to 
literary centones.

·The impact that authorial distribution has on the temporality of its 
objects, as the multiple agents that form part of the distribution of 
those objects spread the processes of their decomposition/re-composition 
over time.

·The re-orienting of power relations that arises from the distribution 
of authorship among networks of senders and receivers, as also from the 
collapsing of 'sender' and 'receiver' functions into one another.

·The modes of 'self'-regulation that authorial collectives develop in 
order to sustain their identity.

·Fandom and participatory culture, in both digital and traditional 
textual media.

·The operational dynamics of 'multitexts' and 'text networks', and their 
influence by and on virtual networks.

Paper proposals will be selected for their potential to open up 
questions that transcend the idiom of any single medium and/or 
discipline. Please send a proposal of approximately 500 words to 
(gurds /at/ missouri.edu) by January 15, 2018.

Confirmed participants include:

*Mario Biagioli*, Distinguished Professor of Law and Science and 
Technology Studies, and director of the Centre for Science and 
Innovation Studies, UC Davis.

*Georgina Born*, Professor of Music and Anthropology, Oxford University.

*Christopher Kelty*, Professor of Anthropology, Information Studies, and 
at the Institute for Society and Genetics, UCLA.

*Scott McGill*, Professor of Classics, Rice University .

*Daniel Selden*, Professor of Literature, UC Santa Cruz.

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