4Humanities / IPLAI Reading Group Defining Digital Humanities

Session 6: Digital Architectures: The Politics of Authorship, Publication, and Dissemination

In this session, we will be discussing the politics coded into digital architectures in terms of authorship, publication, and dissemination. Questions that we will address may include: Who is the author? How does citation operate? How does “ownership” work? How is work disseminated? Collected? What does it mean to be a public intellectual? What new ways of being a public intellectual are made possible by technology? What does publishing look like, and what will it look like in the future? And how do changes in communication structures effect / affect knowledge structures and practices?
In the background of this discussion, we must keep in mind that the digital architectures we build today are laden with ideology and that “technical” decisions are often also value judgments. As the academy establishes its presence in the digital world, the ways in which it codes its cyberspaces, policy and design decisions involved in establishing digital book collections, building virtual tools, publishing and distributing works, interfacing with the non-academic public(s), and dealing with corporate entities will be battlegrounds for competing interests and ideologies.