Larger than Life? A Stylometric Analysis of the Multi-Authored 'Vita' of Hildegard of Bingen

This article explores by aid of stylometric methods the collaborative authorship of the Vita Hildegardis, Hildegard of Bingen's (auto-?)biography. Both Hildegard and her biographers gradually contributed to the text in the course of the last years of Hildegard's life, and it was posthumously completed in the mid-1180s by end redactor Theoderic of Echternach. In between these termini a quo and ante quem the work was allegedly taken up but left unfinished by secretaries Godfrey of Disibodenberg and Guibert of Gembloux. In light of the fact that the Vita is an indispensable source in gaining historical knowledge on Hildegard's life, the question has often been raised whether the Life of Hildegard is – by dint of contributions by multiple stakeholders – a larger-than-life depiction of the visionary's life course. Specifically the 'autobiographical' passages included in the Vita, in which Hildegard is allegedly cited directly and is taken to recount biographical information in the first-person singular, have been approached with suspicion. By applying state-of-the-art computional methods for the automatic detection of writing style (stylometry), the delicate questions of authenticity and collaborative authorship of this (auto?)hagiographical text are addressed.

Collaborative Authorship and Postmigration in Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s Novel Montecore

Montecore. En unik tiger (2006) stages its own making through the joint authorship of Kadir, a friend of Abbas’, and Jonas, a young writer and Abbas’ son. Their collaboration aims at a novel about Abbas, who migrated from Tunisia to Sweden, now a missing person. The interpretation of his life proves to be a conflicting ground for the co-authors because of their generational differences. This article proposes an analysis of Montecore building upon the notion of collaborative or multiple authorship (Stillinger 1991; Love 2002), and upon the discussion in Scandinavia and in Germany on contemporary migration and postmigration literature. Through a metafictional collaborative authorship – a so far neglected dimension in the study of Montecore – Jonas Hassen Khemiri depicts a young author’s ambivalent feelings towards his father and his story. Abbas has vanished from the family, but his special gift to Jonas, through Kadir’s mediation, deals with a linguistic talent that defies the rules of Swedish, showing the power of language to invent, and to imagine a different and less oppressive order.

Learning design to embed digital citizenship skills in the undergraduate classroom: A collaboration among instructor, academic librarian, and Wikipedian

A collaboration among an instructor, librarian, and Wikipedia was initiated to help second-year undergraduate students at University College Dublin, Ireland, increase their digital citizenship skills through publishing in Wikipedia. The collaboration brought together diverse relevant expertise to design and deliver an effective learning experience. Integrating Wikipedia into the classroom experience gave students firsthand involvement with the research and scholarly communication process. The chapter is divided among three perspectives, reflecting academic, library, and Wikipedia perspectives on the implementation of the collaborative authorship project: <jats:list list-type="order"> <jats:list-item> Deeper learning through learning design in the classroom using Wikipedia—an academic’s perspective. </jats:list-item> <jats:list-item> Using Wikipedia to teach critical thinking and academic integrity—a librarian’s perspective. </jats:list-item> <jats:list-item> Enabling university students to write and publish collaboratively with Wikipedia—a Wikipedian’s perspective. </jats:list-item> </jats:list> Students engaged enthusiastically with Wikipedia. Challenges included supporting students in implementing new learning, such as academic integrity skills. The partnership among academic staff, the library, and Wikipedia suggests a potential framework for learning design (Boling, 2010), which may help others apply a similar experiential approach to learning.

Multiple co-first authors, co-corresponding authors and co-supervisors: a synthesis of shared authorship credit

PurposeAuthorship is the ultimate status of intellectual recognition in academic publishing. Although fairly robust guidelines have already been in place for a considerable amount of time regarding authorship criteria and credit, such as those by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors or Contributor Roles Taxonomy, the lack of reliable verification techniques hamper their accuracy, thereby reducing the validity of authorship claims in such statements. This paper aims to focus on the authorship status and responsibilities of co-first authors and co-corresponding authors.Design/methodology/approachTo appreciate authorship responsibilities in this subset of authors, the broader academic authorship literature, as well as position statements, rules and guidelines, were consulted.FindingsAcademic publishing that relies on metrics is a global multi-billion-dollar business, so strict measures to assess and confirm authorship, which can be intellectually or financially “profitable” among academics that game such metrics, are needed. The current assessment is that there are inconsistent rules for equally credited authors such as co-first authors, co-corresponding authors and co-supervisors. In shared and collaborative authorship, there are also shared authorship-related responsibilities, but these are infrequently discussed, or tend to only be dealt with broadly.Originality/valueWithin the wider, and important, discussion about authorship, which is one of the most central issues in academic publishing, there has been a limited focus on equally credited authors such as co-first authors, co-corresponding authors and co-supervisors. This paper expands and fortifies that discussion.

Teaching and Researching the History of Sexual Politics at San Francisco State, 1969–1970

This essay summarizes the methods and results of a collaborative student-faculty research project on the history of sexual politics at San Francisco State University. The collaborators collected and analyzed 160 mainstream, alternative, student, and LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans) media stories. After describing the project parameters and process, the essay discusses six themes: (1) LGBT history; (2) the Third World Liberation Front strike; (3) feminist sexual politics; (4) the history of heterosexuality; (5) sex businesses, commerce, and entrepreneurship; and (6) sexual arts and culture. The conclusion discusses project ethics and collaborative authorship. The essay’s most significant contributions are pedagogical, providing a model for history teachers interested in working with their students on research skills, digital methodologies, and collaborative projects. The essay also makes original contributions to historical scholarship, most notably in relation to the Third World Liberation Front strike. More generally, the essay provides examples of the growing visibility of LGBT activism, the intersectional character of race, gender, and sexual politics, the complicated nature of gender and sexual politics in the “movement of movements,” the commercialization of sex, and the construction of normative and transgressive heterosexualities in this period.

Collectivity and Crisis in the Long Twentieth Century

In this essay the Warwick Research Collective (WReC) addresses the question of “what is and isn’t changing” in literary studies by reflecting on the material conditions that structure its disciplinary workscape. The essay notes that the pressures of a specifically academic form of capitalism, responding to and flourishing in a period of institutional crisis, tend to replicate top-down, marketized models of academic entrepreneurship in the ways we read. Departing from more widely favored models of “collaboration” and “interdisciplinarity” as solutions to this problem, the essay reflects instead on the history and potential of the collective as a form of self-organized, nonhierarchical knowledge production. It argues that the interlinked crises of how to read in world-literary terms, and on what scale, unavoidably index more general crises of the humanities and of academic labor when considered against the backdrop of an unstable neoliberal hegemony, particularly that of the mass automatization and shedding of labor. The essay concludes by considering political and literary examples of collaborative authorship before addressing the question of WReC’s own process, a form of joint working-through that the collective regards as fundamental to any emancipatory politics.

Collaboration

This chapter demonstrates how the process of constructing a theory of authorship around a single individual, writing independently or authoring in solitary isolation, has become untenable. New media technologies make new forms of authorship possible and invite alternative methods of conceptualizing an author—from zines, to the Web 2.0, to comics. This chapter thus presents an overview of recent philosophical approaches to the question of collaborative authorship and advocates for an approach to the phenomenon that would rely less on authorial intentions than it would on commitments. The distinction has obvious implications for theories of authorship more generally: to call yourself an author, so it suggests, you have to be willing also to take ethical and intellectual ownership of what you have written.