A considerable amount of what we understand about the nature of scholarship, including authorship practice, is disrupted within digital environments. Within this manifesto statement, we consider the academic author to be the scholar expounding on her area of expertise in a monograph, but also the recently enrolled undergraduate who is uncertainly composing his first course work assignment. Although the level of expertise and experience might differ, the professor and student are united by the idea of the author as an individual in possession of a creative agency through which the text is crafted and stabilized. Authorship has tended to be seen as the practice of individually or jointly producing the research paper, lab report, or other artifact of scholarship. The nature of authorship becomes more complex, however, within increasingly digital compositional environments. Bayne (2006) draws on Foucault’s (1977) poststructuralist conception of the author function and Poster’s (2001) ideas around analogue and digital authorship to argue that authorship is troubled by digital environments, while Fitzpatrick (2011b) recognizes the representational possibilities of the remix or mash-up where the creator’s words are woven together with visual, aural, and other web-based content. The ease with which we can browse, download, and then reuse networked material provides new ways of representing academic knowledge while also altering the nature of authorship itself. For Fitzpatrick (2011b), we
find our values shifting away from a sole focus on the production of unique, original new arguments and texts to consider instead curation as a valid form of scholarly activity, in which the work of authorship lies in the imaginative bringing together of multiple threads of discourse that originate elsewhere, a potentially energizing form of argument via juxtaposition. (11–12)
In using the term juxtaposition here, Fitzpatrick draws our attention to the orchestration of scholarship that can take place when we write online. For example, a scholar might intersperse his own written commentary with YouTube clips or embed direct, click-through links to the writing of others, or weave in images and audio pulled from multiple external sources. This provides particularly rich compositional possibilities for the student authors as they are able to draw on different voices while simultaneously working across genres, bringing together the representational powers of pictures, sounds, and words. One consequence of this digitally mediated and multimodal rich scholarship, however, is the question it provokes around attribution and citation. To put it more simply, when a student embeds a film clip, imports a stock photo, or downloads a soundtrack to help advance his or her ideas, the teacher might ask whether this compromises the student’s claim to authorship, with implications for assessment that we discuss in chapter 9. Or, conversely, the teacher might see a student’s ability to source and then configure digital material as a kind of curatorship and argumentation that should be recognized and rewarded.
The evolving character of authorship in digital environments also, according to Adami (2012), has implications for power as well as the nature of composition. A cut-and-paste culture supports new opportunities for the production of multimodal texts but also, in Adami’s view, facilitates the reproduction of networked content out of context, thereby raising questions about authorial responsibility and power. Of course, there is nothing new in a student misjudging how a quote or other piece of supporting evidence might translate from journal article to essay; the significance, however, lies in the ease with which a rapidly deployed key command can replicate chunks of content from the ostensibly social space of the Web within a piece of scholarship. In this way, the conventional assignment can resemble less an essay than a collage or commonplace book. Therefore, the reuse of networked content that characterizes the mash-up or remix assignment certainly presents new possibilities for the representation of academic knowledge, but at the same time provokes important and complex questions for teachers about authorship, quality, and authenticity. Going further, the position that an educator or institution adopts in relation to the nature of authorship in increasingly digital and multimodal contexts needs to reflected in pedagogy, for instance, within learning outcomes and the dialogue with students that takes place around assessment (Lamb 2018). If nothing else, as long as we are going to allow, encourage, or require students to demonstrate ability and understanding in images and audio, we should spend time exploring with them issues around copyright and attribution in the same way that attention is currently given to discouraging plagiarism in written material.
If remix scholarship sits uneasily with some of the deeply rooted assumptions about originality within education, authorship is redefined in a much subtler way through the working of code within the devices, software, and search engines drawn into the creation of academic digital artifacts. Considered from a sociomaterial perspective, the computer-aided drawing, blog post, and multimedia essay cannot be solely attributed to the individuated human author but instead can be seen as emerging from a multitude of human and material interests. These agents include the algorithmic operations that structure and shape the interface by which the article or assignment is prepared. For example, the intrusion of personalized advertisements in a student blog post, targeted according to the browser history and data trail of the teacher reading it, is authored by the environment and shaped according to the commercial interests of the blog platform rather than by the student, but nonetheless becomes part of the submitted blog post.
While technology has always been implicated in the production of academic knowledge, there is a considerable difference between the content-generating possibilities of contemporary hardware and software and the previous technologies of rollerball pen and refill pad, for example. The typical smartphone presents the opportunity to record, edit, and share a short film to a standard that until relatively recently would have been limited to those with considerable technical expertise and access to expensive equipment. The same device, used to download special effects and browse how-to videos, promises shortcuts for the student who has never attended a film production class or visited an editing studio. Therefore, when digital technology is heavily implicated in the creation of the digital artifact, code becomes a coauthor within a complex assemblage of interests extents far beyond the student submitting the assignment or, as Gourlay and Oliver suggest (2013): “Authorship becomes distributed, interwoven between machine and human, as opposed to being associated with a singular, embodied human subject. In this conception, texts are produced by multiple, hybrid biological entities meshed with wide online networks through the writing process” (82).
To ask a student to create work within such a context requires an openness on the part of the teacher—and the institution within which both are embedded—to these new forms of authorship. When stability and authenticity of a text owned by a single student author gives way to juxtaposition, remix, and sharing, conventional methods of establishing the quality of student work are placed under significant pressure. If we want to adopt such methods—and we argue that we should want to, where it is appropriate—we need to be able to develop new standards and norms for how we measure the standard of student work. Remixing digital content redefines authorship.