The Diss Abstract + InaDWriMo Goals
InaDWriMo starts tomorrow, and I’m as ready as I’m going to get. The house is sorta clean, I’ve figured out a schedule, and the students are moving into the part of the semester where I do far more grading than prep. I have a big pile o' diss stuff, both resources and my own writing, although I’m also still collecting data. And I have a button and word meter on the sidebar.
Setting the word-count goal for this next month has been difficult. I figured out in my second semester of doctoral coursework that I would probably write a diss on Wikipedia, so I started throwing seminar papers at the topic then. I discovered the Chambers Cyclopaedia in my last semester of courses, so that seminar paper went to that, as have one conference presentation and one article. As much of my exam writing went to the project as possible, and I've written various other scraps since then. And, of course, the diss proposal.
So I have a big pile of words already — somewhere between 100 and 140 pages. But it’s not anything yet. Some of it’s redundant (because I had to keep explaining wikis to people for awhile), some of it is about Wikipedia three years ago (anarchic) versus Wikipedia now (guild structures). So my goals for November are twofold, I suppose:
1. Weed and revise the writing. I dumped it into unedited chapters last April, but the overall structure has changed during the proposal defense as my committee hashed it over, and I’ve tweaked it again since then. Everything needs to be re-sorted and re-written. And then there’s a ton of new stuff that needs to be generated. Do so.
2. Do the new data collection that I finally became convinced is a needful thing. Get it collected and get the coding pushed as far along as possible.
It would probably be most sensible to code first and then write, but that also gives me permission to put off the writing for even longer. And besides, the coding is not going to change the historical parts of this thing. It’s not like I’m going to write the conclusion now, but there’s no reason I can’t move along with the intro and methodology sections, as well as the analysis I’ve already done on Chambers’ 1728 Preface. Racking up some words that I feel are at least a draft instead of a pile of things is the only way I’m going to start feeling better about this whole endeavor. If I was doing straight writing, I would set the goal higher than 20,000 words because, well, a lot of this month is about revising old material. But there’s also collecting and coding, which are a huge chunk of time. So big a chunk that listing both of these things together is making me hyperventilate a little. But I think the pressure will be helpful right now.
Here’s the project abstract, in case you’re curious about what I’m slaving away on:
Wikipedia is often discussed as a textual revolution: the first massively collaborative, Internet-based encyclopedia that belongs to the public domain. While it’s true that wiki technology does afford large-scale collaboration that we have not been able to achieve in the past, the concept of a collaboratively produced encyclopedia is not new, and neither is the idea that private ownership might not apply to such documents. More than 275 years ago, in the preface to the 1728 edition of his Cyclopædia, Ephraim Chambers mused on the intensely collaborative nature of the volumes he was about to publish. His thoughts were remarkably similar to contemporary intellectual property arguments for Wikipedia, and the compilation and structure of these encyclopedias demonstrate numerous similarities. Ten years later, he solicited and incorporated public submissions into the second edition.
This dissertation employs a grounded, mixed method approach to examine issues of authorship and ownership in these two texts. The research will demonstrate that the “Author Construct” is not static across eras, genres, or print technologies. In contrast to traditional considerations of the poetic author, the encyclopedic author engages with different issues of agency, authority, identity, and trust. These variations challenge contemporary ideas concerning the difference between print and digital authorship as well as the notion that new media intellectual property arguments are without historical precedent. More broadly, this study contributes to an understanding of the role of authorship and ownership in the current heated discourse concerning intellectual property.