Authorship Studies Research Articles

Trends in Communication Scholarship: An Analysis of Four Representative NCA and ICA Journals over the Last 70 Years

As the demand for research productivity continues to rise for communication scholars, it is important to understand the norms that govern publication in our scholarly journals, since these influence promotion and tenure decisions. This project examined publication patterns of four representative communication journals to discern publication norms and changes in them over time. Findings showed an increase in article length, number of references, multiple-authored publications, female authorship, and quantitative studies, but no significant change in number of articles per journal issue. These trends have a number of potential applications for communication scholars.

Black Writers, White Publishers: Marketplace Politics in Twentieth-Century African-American Literature (review)

Reviewed by: Black Writers, White Publishers: Marketplace Politics in Twentieth-Century African-American Literature Scarlett Higgins Black Writers, White Publishers: Marketplace Politics in Twentieth-Century African-American Literature. John K. Young . Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2006. Pp. ix + 230. $40.00 (cloth). Black Writers, White Publishers presents an argument that initially appears to be so clearly true that it seems surprising that no one has made it before. This argument is, briefly, that the social category of "race" affects the social activity of book production, from both the author's and the publisher's perspective, and that to fail to take this construct into account when analyzing a book's publication history is necessarily to distort that history. More specifically, Young contends that, "The predominantly white publishing industry reflects and often reinforces the racial divide that has always defined American society, representing 'blackness' as a one-dimensional cultural experience" (4). Following up on the insights of textual studies—and influenced in particular by Jerome McGann and George Bornstein—Young adds race as a crucial component in the social practice of book production. This study is as much historical and sociological as it is aesthetic—though it makes limited use of historical or sociological jargon. Rather, by viewing the writing and publishing of books as a collaborative effort, it discloses this practice as one that is inherently social, and that reflects the racial history of its time. The chapters of BWWP are a series of case studies on Nella Larsen's Passing, Gwendolyn Brooks's late career (after her move to Broadside and Third World Press), Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo, Toni Morrison's collaboration with the Oprah Book Club, and Ralph Ellison's last manuscript, which has been published only as the novel Juneteenth. These texts span nearly the entire twentieth century, and were produced under divergent historical and cultural contexts. In the most thoroughly persuasive chapter, Young argues that because it is impossible to know whether Larsen asked, or even agreed, to have the final paragraph of Passing, deleted editions of the novel that fail to acknowledge this indeterminacy explicitly produce a misleading edition of the text. With no extant Larsen archive to consult, scholars and critics are left to speculation [End Page 371] or, as Young prefers, editions that foreground this textual ambiguity: "To edit or teach Passing without acknowledging its incomplete history . . . forces the text to pass as stable, and thus erases the material and racial histories behind this textual mask" (38–39). The notion that, in a novel as important as Passing, such a central emendation as the content of the ending could be in flux, and moreover, that some Larsen scholars could view this change as inconsequential illustrates Young's central thesis forcefully. In each chapter, Young reads closely the paratextual apparatuses, such as the front and back covers (images and text), author photos, blurbs, colophons, and even the ISBN codes, and imbues with remarkable layers of meaning these seemingly mundane and inconsequential aspects of the physical text. His chapter on Ishmael Reed focuses largely on one aspect of this paratextual apparatus—the white-on-black copyright page that was present in the first printing of Mumbo Jumbo but not in the reprints. Here, Young argues that, "[b]y blackening the page that identifies Mumbo Jumbo, first, through its ISBN number, second, through its Library of Congress catalog card number, and, third as Reed's property by virtue of his copyright, Reed adds race to the capitalist literary equation, using the color often associated with obscurity to illustrate ironically the operating assumptions of textual ownership on which the white page depends" (86). Perhaps even more impressively, as the example itself is less dramatic, Young contends that Passing's colophon envisions a white audience for the typeface that it purportedly describes. The colophon of Larsen's novel thus " . . . returns America to a history in which full citizenship and independence were racially and sexually determined" (41). This uncanny ability to find substantive meaning in the least studied aspects of a text expands Young's comparatively brief analyses of the literary texts outward toward the social world. This study of authorship and book production as a social...

The ACRL Conferences: A Profile of its Presenters

This study provides a profile of the authors of contributed papers at the first twelve ACRL conferences. It found that the conference presenters tend to be female academic librarians (administrators, reference librarians, and subject specialists) from Doctoral Research institutions in the Midwest. It also discovered several trends. During its 27-year history, there have been increases in the number of female authors, library school faculty giving papers, and authors from master’s and baccalaureate institutions. In addition, the rate of collaboration has grown. The profile and its related trends were very similar to what has been reported in C&RL authorship studies—with one exception. Women are more likely to appear as conference presenters than journal authors. Further research should explore the role of gender in scholarly communication.

On Poetry and Collaboration in the Nineteenth Century

On Poetry and Collaboration in the Nineteenth Century1 Seth Whidden Villanova University Armand haussa les épaules, et sur un ton tout différent: "Pour te consoler, veux-tu savoir la composition de notre premier numéro? Il y aura donc mon nocturne; quatre chansons de Cob-Lafleur; un dialogue de Jarry; des poèmes en prose du petit Ghéridanisol, notre pensionnaire; et puis le Fer à repasser, un vaste essai de critique générale, où se préciseront les tendances de la revue. Nous nous sommes mis à plusieurs pour pondre ce chef-d'œuvre." Olivier, qui ne savait que dire, argue gauchement: "Aucun chef-d'œuvre n'est le résultat d'une collaboration."2 So says Olivier in Les faux-monnayeurs, and he is not alone in his distaste for multiple authorship. The "myth of solitary genius,"3 as Jack Stillinger and others have discussed, has long held sway in much of literary studies, going back to "the concept of the poet as prophet and possessor of transcendent knowledge [. . . giving] the writer and the artistic intention an especially exalted status."4 Recently, however, considerations of the instability of this traditional "solitary genius" have shown how, "[b]ecause a collaborative text depicts the author in nervous crisis (breaking down, splitting in two), double writing is a symptom of the monolithic author's decline."5 In this respect, literary collaboration is an example of Bakhtinian "heteroglossia," with multiple languages existing in every word.6 "Collaborative texts, like quilted novels, make the reader vulnerable to heterogeneity and indeterminacy, and, by obscuring who wrote what, they prevent the reader from limiting the text's sense."7 In particular, gender studies have questioned the notion of the monolithic author, with good reason, and have focused on the multiplicity offered by collaborative texts.8 For many such studies, literary collaboration extends beyond the page and enters into the more social aspects of textual creation; in this model, multiple authorship reflects "the partners' search for [End Page 73] fulfillment and self-expression."9 In a description that bears similar tones, the Goncourt brothers called their own collaboration: [. . .] la confession de deux vies inséparées dans le plaisir, le labeur, la peine; de deux pensées jumelles, de deux esprits recevant du contact des hommes et des choses, des impressions si semblables, si identiques, si homogènes, que cette confession peut être considérée comme l'expansion d'un seul moi et d'un seul je.10 Early studies of multiple authorship focused less on who contributed what and more on the silent partners: those whose contributions went unnoticed. As Bette London discussed in her book Writing Double: [. . .] in the case of women, literary collaborators suffered from a double invisibility—the invisibility of collaboration and the invisibility of women's writing. Even where such collaborations were openly recognized, they tended to be represented in ways guaranteed to ensure their marginalization. To study collaboration, then, was to study the conditions of its erasure.11 While Wayne Koestenbaum's Double Talk: The Erotics of Male Literary Collaboration is arguably the most important recent study of collaborative literature,12 it is incomplete in its consideration of multiple-author works. Texts from the Album zutique reside outside Koestenbaum's useful but somewhat limited definition, and I would like to propose a new model for considering literary collaboration, in nineteenth-century French poetry and beyond. Before I do, however, I should disclose my own biases concerning authorship. First, to avoid excessive repetition of the word "writer," I sometimes use the terms "author" and "writer" interchangeably, even though they obviously do not designate the same person, as illustrated by the example of Colette and Willy, among many others.13 As we shall see, collaboration focuses on the process of literary creation; as such, the writer should be taken to be the privileged member of any writer/author divide in this study. In addition, while there is much to be said about the numerous kinds of...

Frontispieces and Other Ruins: Portraits of the Author in Henry James's New York Edition

This article explores three "apparitions" of the author-figure in the paratexts (frontispieces and prefaces) of Henry James's New York Edition. These "portraits of the author" are discussed with references to recent authorship studies and studies in the history and function of frontispiece illustrations of the author. The article concludes that James's "self-portraits" within his "collected edition" should be interpreted in the context of visual techniques of nineteenth-century culture (architecture, silhouettes, and photography), visual techniques that figure prominently in James's redefinitions of the author's relation to his past self and life's work. As such, the article proposes that Henry James's New York Edition suggests a new "mode of reading" the relationship between outward forms and interior substances, which cannot be disregarded in interpretations of James's late works.

Style markers in authorship studies

Style markers in authorship studies

Horizons West: Directing the Western from John Ford to Clint Eastwood by Jim Kitses

W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n l it e r a t u r e S p r in g 2 0 0 6 substantial work. It should also meet the editors’ goal of inspiring further schol­ arship on this prolific writer. In this, their effort to “honor a living writer whose work is not done,” Weltzien and Maher certainly succeed (14). Horizons West: Directing the Western from John Ford to Clint Eastwood. By Jim Kitses. London: British Film Institute, 2004. 342 pages, $24.95. Reviewed by Leonard Engel Quinnipiac University, Hamden, Connecticut Jim Kitses has come out with a new edition of his ground-breaking study of Western film. First published when the traditional Western was declining in popularity and many critics were already pronouncing its death knell, Horizons West: Anthony Mann, Budd Boetticher, Sam Peckinpah; Studies ofAuthorship within the Western (1969) gave scholarly legitimacy to the genre. It also revived inter­ est in the Westerns of Anthony Mann and Budd Boetticher and introduced a relatively new director of feature films, Sam Peckinpah. This new edition goes considerably further. Filled with new material, it deepens and enriches our understanding of Mann, Boetticher, and Peckinpah, adds a lengthy chapter on John Ford, and concludes with fascinating chapters analyzing and interpreting the work of Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood. Kitses proposes in his new examination to study “the Western through the lens of its major directors” and “its major directors within the framework of the genre,” and he does precisely that. These six filmmakers, Kitses contends, “can be seen as constituting a great tradition of the Western genre” (1). For Kitses, the Western hasn’t passed on yet. It has changed considerably, however, and he discusses these changes with perceptive insight, definitive scholarship, and a passion that will satisfy both aficionados of the Western and general readers. In an introductory chapter giving an overview of the Western and inci­ sively commenting on recent representational and psychoanalytic perspectives, Kitses clarifies his prime objective “to provide a greater accessibility to the genre and films, and to the critical and theoretical issues they raise” (22). He elaborates, “My basic premise is that at its core the Western manies historical and archetypal elements ... [and] allows different film-makers a wide latitude of creative play. Where Ford and Peckinpah generate an epic historical canvas, Mann, Boetticher and Eastwood explore archetypal and existential aspects of the frontier experience” (14). Leone, on the other hand, appropriates the genre to his own “mythology, national ethos and authorial system,” demystifying, dismantling, and subverting it (16). Kitses regrets what he calls “limitations of the original project”—primar­ ily not being able to include a chapter on Ford; however, he more than makes up for it in this new edition. In chapter 2, “John Ford: Founding Father,” he thoroughly examines Ford’s Westerns, pointing out that Ford directed about B o o k R e v ie w s one hundred and sixty films, of which approximately one third were Westerns, a prodigious output when compared to other directors. Fascinated by Ford’s thematic ambiguity, Kitses argues convincingly that while Ford’s main theme is “the birth of America, the establishing of nationhood, the shining City on the Hill,” at the same time, he is “the poet of America’s decline, the melancholy chronicler of defeat and loss” (33). Ford created “a heroic cinema, a luminous and uplifting world of myth and memory,” Kitses writes, but over “this shining world a second cast its ... tragic shadow of life’s inevitable pain, sacrifice and compromise” (133). Like Ford, Sam Peckinpah, “Ford’s bastard son” (288), mourned the death of the frontier and the advent of the modem world, and while they both shared the same “spiritual and tragic vision,” Peckinpah’s response was distinctly dif­ ferent. While Ford’s violence “was ritualistic and mythic,” Peckinpah showed violence “both from within and without,” allowing us to “experience it directly and yet to stand back, to register the blood and slaughter plus the fact that it is being presented in aesthetically pleasing forms. ... The complexity of response, visceral and moral,” is what makes Peckinpah’s dramatizations so...

Film and Authorship (review)

Film and Authorship David Gurney (bio) Wexman, Virginia Wright, ed. Film and Authorship. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2003. 270 pages, $22.00 paper. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. In film studies the concept of the author has experienced various degrees of acceptance, ranging from full incorporation to vehement repudiation. As a result, whether lauding or denying thepresence of the film author, questions of authorship are inextricably woven into the fabric of film studies. Now that the topic is viewed more affably than it has been in the past, it is truly apropos that Film and Authorship, an anthology of essays working with the idea of authorship in film, has been assembled by editor Virginia Wright Wexman. Acting as both a recapitulation and revaluation of topic, this collection works as an introduction to the debates while focusing on the assertion of the viability of the author as a framework within which to better understand film. Wexman's introduction sets the stage rather nicely by offering an overview of the topic without getting mired in minutiae. Examining such a seminal strand of film theory could be rather intimidating, but Wexman gives the reader a succinct grounding in the history of approaches to authorship in film. Appropriately, she begins with an excavation of the construction of authorial prominence, which is rooted in "the Romantic notion of the creative genius nurtured by an inner spark of inspiration" (9). Building off Helen Kritch Chinoy's claim that, in the nineteenth century, theater directors gained status as authors, Wexman suggests that this forged a template for film directors to be viewed likewise. However, the director has not been the only position of authority to emerge in film. The collective quality of filmmaking is acknowledged, as well as the focus of poststructurally minded filmmaking, which foregrounds cultural contributions to the filmic text over any concept of individual authorship. Citing the 1981 British Film Institute anthology Theories of Authorship as a milestone in authorship studies embracing both structural and poststructural approaches to the topic, Wexman asserts that she sees her collection as pulling together the finest examples of post-1981 scholarship, and, aside from the opening piece by Andrew Sarris, first published in 1977, she is largely correct. The fourteen essays contained within the collection are divided into three sections: theoretical statements, historical and institutional contexts, and case studies. These section titles are apt descriptions of the pieces contained within them, and this review will look at two pieces from each of the sections to consider their value. Colin MacCabe's "The Revenge of the Author" operates as a self-inflicted mediation between his appreciation of the Barthesian opposition to the concept of the author and his competing aversion to the deconstruction of authorship arising from his personal experiences with filmmaking. Struggling with Barthes's view of sociality as author, MacCabe concedes that filmmaking is far too collective a process to claim any single author as a film's total creative force. Recognizing that any text is essentially [End Page 101] cultural putty for audiences to decode as they wish, he laments the inability to capture all of the varied readings and responses produced. In lieu of a totalized understanding, he suggests that "any future audience can be approached only through the first audience for the film—the cast and crew who produced it." Threading this concept of the cast and crew as the origin of meaning through the needle of Walter Benjamin's work, MacCabe suggests that there exists no true totalized meaning, and thus no totalized author, for any text. Benjamin attempted to foreground his own subjective perspective of history in his writing by employing techniques of montage and in doing this made it clear that there can exist no complete understanding of any social phenomena, only an understanding of the here-and-now interpretations. MacCabe uses this to force the point that the best approximation to a text's origination of meaning is through examination of the initial audience of cast and crew but that it is still only one approach to understanding and should not be taken as the final assessment of a film. Through its dialogue with Barthes...

Yule’s Characteristic K Revisited

The measure of lexical repetition constitutes one of the variables used to determine the lexical richness of literary texts, a value further employed in authorship attribution studies. Although most of the constants for lexical richness actually depend on text length, Yule’s characteristic is considered to be highly reliable for being text length independent. It is not the aim of this paper questioning the validity of K to measure the lexical repeat-rate, nor to evaluate its usefulness in authorship studies, but to review the most accurate procedure to calculate its value in the light of the lack of standardization found in the specific literature. At the same time, the peculiar calculation of Yule’s K by TACT is explained. Our study suggests that standardization will certainly help improve the studies where K is employed.

Teaching Scholarship During The 1990s: A Study of Authorship in Teaching Sociology

While the scholarship of teaching has risen in prominence in the past few decades, little is presently known about the structure of knowledge creation and dissemination in that area of scholarship. Such basic facts as the characteristics of programs that perform and publish the research (e.g., B.A., M.A., or Ph.D.), or the identities of specific schools that are leaders in teaching scholarship remain undocumented. This article explores the topic through counts of articles and notes published in a major outlet in the scholarship of teaching, Teaching Sociology, during the decade of the 1990s. We address the following: (1) Does publication of teaching scholarship vary by the type of degree program (e.g., B.A., M.A., and Ph.D.) or by other characteristics? (2) Are some institutions centers of teaching scholarship? (3) How wide is the scope of teaching scholarship across the nation's departments? Overall, we find that a variety of sociology departments have established records of teaching publishing. Yet, some departments are leaders and appear to create a climate favorable to teaching scholarship. Jonathan Marx is professor of sociology at Winthrop University where he teaches courses in research methods, education, sport, organizations, and health. His most recent publications vary from a social history of science fairs to an examination of final gift exchange among the elderly. Douglas Eckberg is professor of sociology and Chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Winthrop University. He teaches a variety of courses and is convinced that research methods is the most fundamental course for developing critical thinking in students. He will be taking a sabbatical from teaching next year to pursue his strongest research interest–historical (nineteenth-century) southern homicide.

:The Anonymous Renaissance: Cultures of Discretion in Tudor-Stuart England

The Renaissance was in many ways the beginning of modern and self-conscious authorship, a time when individual genius was celebrated and an author's name could become a book trade commodity. Why, then, did anonymous authorship flourish during the Renaissance rather than disappear? In addressing this puzzle, Marcy L. North reveals the rich history and popularity of anonymity during this period. The book trade, she argues, created many intriguing and paradoxical uses for anonymity, even as the authorial name became more marketable. Among ecclesiastical debaters, for instance, anonymity worked to conceal identity, but it could also be used to identify the moral character of the author being concealed. In court and coterie circles, meanwhile, authors turned name suppression into a tool for the preservation of social boundaries. Finally, in both print and manuscript, anonymity promised to liberate an authentic female voice, yet made it impossible to authenticate the gender of an author, in sum, the writers and book producers who helped to create England's literary culture viewed anonymity as a meaningful and useful practice. Written with precision and grace, "The Anonymous Renaissance" should fill a prominent gap in the study of authorship and English literary history.

Reassessing "Genius" in Studies of Authorship: The State of the Discipline

Reassessing "Genius" in Studies of Authorship: The State of the Discipline

On the Ownership of Text

The paper explores the notions of text ownership and its partial inverse, plagiarism, and asks how close or different they are from a procedural point of view that might seek to establish either of these properties. The emphasis is on procedures rather than on the conventional subject division of authorship studies, plagiarism detection etc. We use, as a particular example, our research on the notion of computational detection of text rewriting, in the benign sense of a standard journalist's adaptation of the Press Association newsfeed. The conclusion is that, whatever may be the case in copyright law, procedural detection and establishment of the ownership is a complex and vexed matter. Behind the paper is an unspoken appeal to return to an earlier historical phase, one where texts were normally rewritten and rewritten again and the ownership of text by an individual was a less clear matter than in historically recent times.

The anonymous Renaissance: cultures of discretion in Tudor-Stuart England

was in many ways the beginning of modern and self-conscious authorship, a time when individual genius was celebrated and an author's name could become a book trade commodity. Why, then, did anonymous authorship flourish during the rather than disappear? In addressing this puzzle, Marcy L. North reveals the rich history and popularity of anonymity during this period. book trade, she argues, created many intriguing and paradoxical uses for anonymity, even as the authorial name became more marketable. Among ecclesiastical debaters, for instance, anonymity worked to conceal identity, but it could also be used to identify the moral character of the author being concealed. In court and coterie circles, meanwhile, authors turned name suppression into a tool for the preservation of social boundaries. Finally, in both print and manuscript, anonymity promised to liberate an authentic female voice, yet made it impossible to authenticate the gender of an author, in sum, the writers and book producers who helped to create England's literary culture viewed anonymity as a meaningful and useful practice. Written with precision and grace, The Anonymous Renaissance should fill a prominent gap in the study of authorship and English literary history.

Authorship Practices and Institutional Contexts in Sociology: Elements for a Comparison of the United States and France

Studies of scientific authorship have been developing for forty years. This phenomenon is becoming increasingly well documented. However, most of these studies deal with fields considered in only one national context. This article tries to understand the specific modalities of sociological authorship within two national contexts: the United States and France. The analysis yields an understanding of the logic intimately linking texts and contexts, throwing light not only on the way research and authorship practices are partly shaped by their particular institutional and historical contexts but also on the interactions between cognitive content and patterns of publication.

Has Feminism Changed Archaeology?

Has Feminism Changed Archaeology?

The Anonymous Renaissance: Cultures of Discretion in Tudor-Stuart England

The Renaissance was in many ways the beginning of modern and self-conscious authorship, a time when individual genius was celebrated and an author's name could become a book trade commodity. Why, then, did anonymous authorship flourish during the Renaissance rather than disappear? In addressing this puzzle, Marcy L. North reveals the rich history and popularity of anonymity during this period. The book trade, she argues, created many intriguing and paradoxical uses for anonymity, even as the authorial name became more marketable. Among ecclesiastical debaters, for instance, anonymity worked to conceal identity, but it could also be used to identify the moral character of the author being concealed. In court and coterie circles, meanwhile, authors turned name suppression into a tool for the preservation of social boundaries. Finally, in both print and manuscript, anonymity promised to liberate an authentic female voice, yet made it impossible to authenticate the gender of an author, in sum, the writers and book producers who helped to create England's literary culture viewed anonymity as a meaningful and useful practice. Written with precision and grace, "The Anonymous Renaissance" should fill a prominent gap in the study of authorship and English literary history.

Another Perspective on Vocabulary Richness

This article examines the usefulness of vocabulary richness for authorship attribution and tests the assumption that appropriate measures of vocabulary richness can capture an author's distinctive style or identity. After briefly discussing perceived and actual vocabulary richness, I show that doubling and combining texts affects some measures in computationally predictable but concep- tually surprising ways. I discuss some theoretical and empirical problems with some measures and develop simple methods to test how well vocabulary richness distinguishes texts by different authors. These methods show that vocabulary richness is ineffective for large groups of texts because of the extreme variability within and among them. I conclude that vocabulary richness is of marginal value in stylistic and authorship studies because the basic assumption that it constitutes a wordprint for authors is false.

Peer Evaluation and Readership of Influential Contributions to the Advertising Literature

Prior research on advertising literature consists primarily of studies of journal article authorship and author productivity, journal content and quality, and citation patterns. Absent from this stream of research is direct evidence of the influence of individual authors and their works in the form of peer evaluation and readership. For this study, a priori lists of influential books and articles were used in a survey of U.S. advertising educators and academic researchers. The results reveal a core of research-based and practice-oriented contributions of widely recognized importance and influence. The findings also provide (1) valuable lists of readings for current and future students and educators; (2) direct evidence of the quality of individual literary contributions; and (3) useful insights into the theoretical, intellectual, and practical foundations of the field.

Statistical Stylistics and Authorship Attribution: an Empirical Investigation

This paper investigates the effectiveness and accuracy of multivariate analysis, specifically cluster analysis, of the frequencies of very frequent words in distinguishing texts by different authors and grouping texts by a single author. An examination of groups of texts by known authors shows that cluster analyses typically achieve an accuracy rate of less than 90 per cent for contemporary novels, modern British and American novels, and contemporary literary critical texts, both on relatively large groups of texts and on smaller subsets of those texts. Although limiting the analysis to third-person narration, and disambiguating homographic function words improves the results, inaccuracies remain. Furthermore, small groups of problematic texts extracted from the larger groups in simulated authorship studies also fail to cluster correctly. These failures suggest general rather than local problems with the technique, and cast doubt on the effectiveness of cluster analysis for authorship attribution and stylistic study.