Caitlin Lewis
English 303
Rough Draft – Collaborative Authorship
Authorship has become the main topic of discussion and research in the English 303 Multimedia Writing course at West Virginia University. An author is a person who gives existence to thoughts in the form of words or gives existence to anything. Authorship is defined as what determines the responsibility for what is created. While both seem so easy to define, there are a number of different ways people view authorship and what it means to them. Delving further into this subject of authorship, I have chosen to look deeper into the form of authorship, collaborative authorship.
The act of co-creating something while consulting with a group of people to create the project can easily define collaborative authorship. What first came to mind when discussing collaborative authorship was the current New York Time’s best selling community art project, Post Secret. The Post Secret community art project can be defined within authorship as creative collaboration from millions of different people.
Frank Warren, the collaborator, created the Post Secret project in 2005. The idea for this project was very simple; for numerous people to embellish a post secret while portraying a secret that they had never revealed before. Frank Warren handed out hundreds of blank self-addressed post cards to his home in Maryland to strangers in the Washington D.C. area; there were no restrictions made regarding the content of the secret but that it must have never been spoken before. As the project soon received local, national, and international media coverage it grew bigger, becoming books, websites, and series of events. Frank Warren is viewed as the “author” of Post Secret as his name appears on the cover of all books, blogs, and special events or is he only the collaborator? This brought up many points between Post Secret and collaborative authorship.
The collaboration in Post Secret is so interesting and enticing to readers as it comes from strangers from all over the world, all of these people are interested in inserting themselves into the Post Secret community, anonymously. Self-insertion is a literary device where an author character appears within the work of fiction but in disguise. In this case, the author is not in disguise but is completely anonymous to Frank Warren, the public, and all readers.
Post Secret truly takes advantage of the creative process, which is found to be the social process involving new concepts and ideas also by making associations between the creative mind and existing ideas. The creative process is also a great example of the relationship between Post Secret and collaborative authorship.
3 comments:
Hey Caitlin! Great start on your essay. My inital thoughts were that you have a pretty good direction of where you want your essay to go. You did a great job on explaining what Post Secret is and whothe creator of Post secret is. I also really like how you put the Doctorine in there for evidence that he is allwoed to do this. Don't forget to cite these soruces though. There were some parts that sounded repetitive so make sure you go back add new detail and take out words you already said. Also, I would make the first paragraph of your essay stronger. I wouldn't really talk about how our class has been talking abut Multimedia authorship byt jump right into Multimedia authorship and how it affects Post Secret.
I can tell that your claims are that post secret is part of a collaborative peice of work, with anonymous authors. You also claim that Frank Warren is the creator, and is allowed to make these books because of the Fair Use Doctorine. You also make the claim that people like to submit their works because they like being anonymous and being part of this larger community. You have evidence of these claims by talking about Post Secret, but you should go even more in depth and discuss the book individually, the website, the blogs, all seperately so that you ahve more evidence. There are many class topics you could discuss within your paper, such as theories of authorship, narratology, remix cukture, and social media would all be valid points to talk about within your paper because they can relate back to Post Secret.
Overall, I think you need to expand on your ideas and offer even more examples with more references. The flow of your essay so far is very good and you def. have a sense of direction, so it shouldn't be hard for you to jsut expand on the ideas you have already mentioned.
Caitlin,
You have a great draft of your essay and seem to have a concrete direction for the rest of your paper. The main idea you're expressing is about collaborative writing and anonymous authors. You do a good job of explaining what Post Secret is, and I liked your claims about the Doctrine, and how the creator isn't stealing, but sharing, these peoples words. You just have to make sure you add in some citations, and maybe try to incorporate theories of authorship to support some of your claims.
There wasn't too much to change, but maybe try to be less wordy with your introduction, you don't necessarily need all of the class information you gave in the first paragraph. Instead you might want to think about using your introduction paragraph to talk about Post Secret considering that's what your paper is on. You have a really great start, and an interesting topic to work with though!
Hello,
It looks like you have your thoughts and assertions in order, but you are right, you seem to be missing that something else. I would suggesting finding some more or different information about anonymous writing. What you have is good, but perhaps you need to expand it more? How does giving things up anonymously allow for people to use your complete work? How does it hand over all your right? (these things may be obvious, but it might help beef up your essay a little more).
I'm not quite sure what else you can add. It seems like the biggest point you have deals with anonymity. Maybe you can offer another example of a work like post secret to length or expand your ideas. You can try looking at "Found" which takes the lost/dropped writing of others and puts them into a collective work.
good luck and good work
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