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Epistemic presumptions of authorship

Authors:

Richard P. Smiraglia,

Hur-Li Lee,

Hope A. OlsonAuthors Info & Claims

iConference '11: Proceedings of the 2011 iConference

Pages 137 - 143

https://doi.org/10.1145/1940761.1940780

Published: 08 February 2011 Publication History

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Abstract

The major concern of this paper is the cultural ramification of the bibliographic conception of "authorship." Beginning with Foucault's question "what is an author" and his notion of an author as a cultural phenomenon, the paper proceeds to examine the treatment of authorship in cataloging practices of two ancient cultures, the Greek and the Chinese, as well as in the modern Anglo-American cataloging standards from Panizzi's 91 rules to the draft of Resource Description and Access (RDA). An author, as the study shows, is constructed as part of the recognition of "a work" as an essential communicative social entity. All cataloging practices and standards examined, east or west, ancient or modern, exhibit a similar obsessive attitude toward the imposition of an author, be it only a name or a culturally identified entity responsible for the work. In fact, the study demonstrates that as far as cataloging is concerned authorship is the role that is represented rather than any true intellectual responsibility.

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Carvalho CFurlanete FAlbuquerque A(2024)A figura do autorTHE FIGURE OF THE AUTHORLA FIGURA DEL AUTORLogeion: Filosofia da Informação10.21728/logeion.2024v10n2e-691410:2Online publication date: 23-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.21728/logeion.2024v10n2e-6914
Martínez-Ávila DSmiraglia RLee HFox M(2015)What is an author now? Discourse analysis applied to the idea of an authorJournal of Documentation10.1108/JD-05-2014-006871:5(1094-1114)Online publication date: 14-Sep-2015
https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-05-2014-0068
Smiraglia RSmiraglia R(2014)MetadataThe Elements of Knowledge Organization10.1007/978-3-319-09357-4_8(65-78)Online publication date: 23-Jul-2014
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09357-4_8

Index Terms

Epistemic presumptions of authorship
1. Applied computing
  1. Law, social and behavioral sciences
    1. Sociology
2. Social and professional topics

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Reviewer: William Edward Mihalo

The contributors to this paper give an interesting presentation on authorship, catalog systems, and intellectual property. Our concept of authorship dates back to ancient times, when the Greeks divided authors into classes (by subject), provided biographical information about the author, and cited all of the author's works. Similarly, the Chinese identified an author, his lifetime, hometown, career in government, and other achievements. Smiraglia et al. observe that the concept of a catalog of books or a library catalog is linked to the invention of book selling. They also mention that the concept of intellectual property emerged with book selling and book publication. Before the printing press, patrons funded authors. The contributors point out that, On the one hand, the Anglo-American obsession with the identification of authorship receives more reinforcement through the articulation of author roles and the new provision of having multiple authors (i.e., creators) as the lead component of the preferred access point for a work. On the other hand, the new terminology and the structural relegation of authorship rules in relation to identification of works point to an opposite direction. They conclude with this observation: "It is possible that we are returning to our roots in the author as a person with attributes of their own relationships to works at the same time that we are removing the name `author' from our official parlance." Online Computing Reviews Service

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iConference '11: Proceedings of the 2011 iConference

February 2011

858 pages

ISBN:9781450301213

DOI:10.1145/1940761

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Carvalho CFurlanete FAlbuquerque A(2024)A figura do autorTHE FIGURE OF THE AUTHORLA FIGURA DEL AUTORLogeion: Filosofia da Informação10.21728/logeion.2024v10n2e-691410:2Online publication date: 23-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.21728/logeion.2024v10n2e-6914
Martínez-Ávila DSmiraglia RLee HFox M(2015)What is an author now? Discourse analysis applied to the idea of an authorJournal of Documentation10.1108/JD-05-2014-006871:5(1094-1114)Online publication date: 14-Sep-2015
https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-05-2014-0068
Smiraglia RSmiraglia R(2014)MetadataThe Elements of Knowledge Organization10.1007/978-3-319-09357-4_8(65-78)Online publication date: 23-Jul-2014
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09357-4_8

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Digging Wikipedia: The Online Encyclopedia as a Digital Cultural Heritage Gateway and Site

A survey of modern authorship attribution methods

Epistemic Informational Structural Realism

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