Back On (Sort Of)

Yesterday was supposed to be an off day.  Today, not so much.  But, not having done any work yesterday (it was essentially a weekend day for me), I'm not sure I have a whole lot to say about the dissertation.  I'll have to do a bit of reading instead today, and I might work on my Computers and Composition submission a bit more, since I haven't thought about it in a few days.  That would mean reading a few articles, and then maybe moving on to look at some of the more foundational computers and writing texts, like Lanham and the others. 

Most of what I've been reading there has had to do with issues of authorship and intellectual property.  Some of the other ones deal with genre, although maybe not in the rigorous way that I try to in my article.  And, if I remember correctly, none of those pieces directly bring genre and authorship together.  Another way of putting this might be to argue that genre may add a new layer to the thorny issues of authorship that people in the computers and writing community have been working through for some time now.  Moreover, even though people have been looking at authorship and genre, it may be that they haven't yet brought these issue to bear on the emerging (or nearly-stabilized) genre of the scholarly webtext (although there is a little bit of that out there right now).  In other words, I'm urging (in a way) that we continue to turn the lens on our own work, to keep going down this road to see how far it can go.

Probably something else that will be useful will be to look at Wardle's piece on genre, since it seems like it will more directly speak to some of my interests both in the article and in the dissertation.  I might just go ahead and jump into that article, and then hopefully make it back here later today, definitely tomorrow, to flesh out some more of these ideas.