Triangulating "Authorship"

Let me explain my use of quotation marks in the title of this post. Although the scare quotes often point to an ironic, non-literal, or tongue-in-cheek usage of a word, that's not (exactly) what I'm doing here. Rather, I use the quotes to indicate the circulation of a discussion about authorship. The academic conversation about authorship of course has been around for decades at minimum; I'm a bit more interested in a very brief, localized conversation, and I'll couch this in terms of my encounter with it, rather than the actual, chronological history of the conversation itself.

I stumbled upon Amardeep Singh's blog, which otherwise might have escaped my notice since it's not updated too thoroughly. However, his most recent post (October 7) on "New and Forthcoming Publications" includes a link to his article in Project Muse on "Anonymity, Authorship, and Blogger Ethics." The article itself is pretty interesting in that he argues that anonynous and pseudonomyous blogging offers a corrective to postmodern critiques of the dead author. I'm not so concerned here with his argument per se, but rather an interesting link that he attached to his blog post: he links to a blog that a student created for her English class. In Kathryn's English 303 Blog, Katie E. uses Singh's article as a jumping off point for a paper proposal on issues of authorship, especially in online writing forums that may allow for not only pseudonomous but also collective writing. She asks:

How do we define author on sites that are so public with ideas that anyone can come by as they surf the web? What about collaborative creative writing sites like www.webook.com where the point of the site is to help give and take ideas from the community--do those ideas belong to the whole, or to the individual who first posted it, or to the individual who actually makes it into a story. [sic]

Katie E. here is extending an academic conversation that can be traced through Singh and into a future rhetoric that she will create (it is a proposal) but that she has already begun to articulate in this blog post. Because this is a proposal, the genre may not quite fit here. However, it might be worth noting that her questioning tone may evince some of the more exploratory langauge that many (though of course not all) bloggers favor.

More important for my purposes, though, is that Singh's blog allows us to triangulate this conversation between Barthes, Foucault, Singh and the other theorists he cites in his article, and Katie E. Moreover, Katie E., who otherwise might be conisdered "just" (scare quotes ironic here) a student writer actually becomes a more legitimate part of the conversation. The only limitation to this legitimation is that Singh still cites her as "a student at West Virginia University" and offers no commentary about it. However, and this is key, he does link to the course description, and from there we can find the course blog site, ENGL 303: Multimedia Writing, where Katie E's blog is linked along with her classmates'. So, without explicit commentary, we can beging to move beyond a simple triangulation to a more extensive rhetorical ecology that includes Singh, Foucault, Barthes, Katie E., ENGL 303, and now myself.

Now I wonder, is this kind of serendipitous methodology the most appropriate for finding interesting linkages in the changing face of academic writing?