authorship=choice

After working through this week's readings, I have high hopes that I have arrived at a simpler definition of authorship (that will work for me anyways and is, by my own quirks limited to print).

I think that the concept of authorship is tied choice. In other words, I think that authorship should be assumed (or assigned) based on the degree of choice an individual with a given piece of work. For example, let's say that I have sitting in my desk an unpublished manuscript written entirely by myself in my spare time. This would probably be close to an ideal of authorship because I have both control and choice over my work. After that would be publishing my manuscript, but still retain a great deal of control and choice over how my work is published. Even working with an editor, I still retain the power to choose, including the choice of signing a contract that hands over certain rights in exchange for things.

At the other end of the authorship spectrum, we have the example of the technical writer employed by a corporation. In this case, I would name the corporation as the author since they have the greatest power of choice over the material. The organization chooses the subject, the material, the writers, the hours that the writers work, compensation for all individual involved, and means of publication. In this case it is truly impossible to assign a single individual as the author.

Of course, there is a lot of grey space between these two extremes. Also, I haven't taken on the issue of authorship extended to images, music, film, or other multimedia compositions. While I think that the basic underlying concept will transfer, I am not certain that the exact term of "author" will.