Epistemographer

I’m in Cleveland for the weekend at the previously-mentioned workshop. In reading over the papers, I’ve really been wrestling with the slippery distinction between invention and authorship as separate categories. On one level, the two words seem to point to the same kind of creative act, but it seems that the various scholars participating are using them as distinct categories which don’t entirely map onto each other across the disciplines. Some of this is an artifact of disciplinary particularities; in law, for example, copyright has a genaeology which, while structurally similar, is distinct from that of patents (in other words, though they’re both intellectual property, the way we treat texts is different from the way we treat machines because the history of texts is different from the history of technologies).

This fits into my own thoughts on creative amateurs (hackers/tinkerers, etc.) in an intriguing way – I’ve been wondering lately whether it’s useful for me to simply dissolve the distinction between authors (who write texts) and inventors (who write technologies) and treat them all as creators/producers. The benefit here is that I can talk the same way about hardware hackers (who take pre-built artifacts and repurpose them) and media remixers (who do essentially the same thing with pre-written texts), but my concern is whether I’m missing some deeper difference between the two kinds of practice that would complicate things down the road.

More on this as the weekend progresses…

This weekend, I’ll be Cleveland at the Con/Texts of Invention workshop:

This conference interrogates the social and cultural construction of invention – the diverse ways in which invention has been conceptualized in the arts and sciences in the broadest sense, including literature, the fine arts, entertainment, the physical and life sciences, law, economics, medicine, engineering, agriculture, education, communications, computation, finance, and business. Emphasis will be on the institutional cultures, rhetorics, and histories of invention across these fields. In this way the Society seeks to extend and deepen the inquiry of its long-standing project on “Intellectual Property and the Construction of Authorship”

I’m not giving a paper, but was invited to participate by AU Law Professor Peter Jaszi, and I’ve been getting increasingly excited about the weekend as I’ve read through the precirculated papers. If I weren’t in Cleveland, however, I’d be up in New Haven, at the Access to Knowledge conference organized by the Yale Law School Information Society Project:

In the digital era, most multinational corporations and policymakers are of the view that the current trend characterised by increasing intellectual property rights and corporate control over knowledge best serve society’s interests. At the same time, however, a growing number of commentators believe that widespread access to knowledge (A2K) and the preservation of a healthy knowledge commons are the real basis for sustainable human development. Nonetheless, intellectual property-based approaches continue to singlehandedly dictate global legal norms and shape national legal infrastructures.

The first goal of the Yale A2K Initiative is to come up with a new analytic framework for analysing the possibly distortive effects of public policies relying exclusively on intellectual property rights. Beyond this aim, the A2K initiative seeks to support the adoption and development of alternative ways to foster greater access to knowledge in the digitally connected environment.

Two really fascinating conferences, each representative of a particular trend I’ve been noticing in the scholarly world – these days, much of the really fascinating inquiry into information studies has been taking place in the unexpected intersection of STS, Communication/Information Science, and Law.

So, one of the myriad reasons I’ve been letting this space go to seed is that my current host (Neureal) has been having all sorts of troubles…database connections have been unreliable at times, and the Wordpress software itself seems often seems abysmally slow. That in mind, I’m shopping around for a new host for this and my various freelance projects; right now, Dreamhost is looking pretty sweet. Any recommendations?