Copyright and mass social authorship: a case study of the making of the Oxford English dictionary

Social authorship ventures involving masses of volunteers like Wikipedia are thought to be a phenomenon enabled by digital technology, presenting new challenges for copyright law. By contrast, the case study explored in this article uncovers copyright issues considered in relation to a nineteenth century social authorship precedent: the seventy-year process of compiling the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary instigated by the not-for-profit Philological Society in 1858 which involved thousands of casually organised volunteer readers and sub-editors. Drawing on extensive original archival research, the article uses the case study as a means of critically reflecting on the claims of existing interdisciplinary literature concerning copyright and ‘authorship’: unlike the claims of the so-called Romanticism thesis, the article argues that copyright law supported an understanding of NED authorship as collaborative and democratic. Further, in uncovering the practical solutions which lawyers considered in debating issues relating to title and rights clearance, the article uses the nineteenth century experience as a vantage point for considering how these issues are approached today: despite the very different context, the copyright problems and solutions debated in the nineteenth century demonstrate remarkable continuity with those considered in relation to social authorship projects today

Suspended quotations: A corpus analysis of functions

By joining manual analysis and corpus linguistics methods, this paper compares and contrasts the use of suspended quotations in Charles Dickens and Jane Austen. An analysis of two authors whose styles, aims and literary contexts are so different is functional to creating a list of functions typically performed by suspended quotation generally. The study shows that some roles of the suspended quotation reported for Dickens’ novels in previous literature are indeed specific to this writer and his idea of narrative, while others can be considered ‘author-independent’. Furthermore, the current analysis has revealed that suspended quotations lend themselves to a much wider range of functions than those reported and described in the literature thus far

Recent developments in New Testament textual criticism

This is a preprint version of an article published in Early Christianity 2.2 (2011). \ud \ud The article provides an overview of recent developments in New Testament Textual Criticism. The four sections cover editions, manuscripts, citational evidence and methodology. Particular attention is paid to the Editio Critica Maior, the development of electronic resources, newly discovered manuscripts, and the Coherence Based Genealogical Method

How Does Science Come to Speak in the Courts? Citations Intertexts, Expert Witnesses, Consequential Facts, and Reasoning

Citations, in their highly conventionalized forms, visibly indicate each texts explicit use of the prior literature that embodies the knowledge and contentions of its field. This relation to prior texts has been called intertextuality in literary and literacy studies. Here, Bazerman discusses the citation practices and intertextuality in science and the law in theoretical and historical perspective, and considers the intersection of science and law by identifying the judicial rules that limit and shape the role of scientific literature in court proceedings. He emphasizes that from the historical and theoretical analysis, it is clear that, in the US, judicial reasoning is an intertextually tight and self-referring system that pays only limited attention to documents outside the laws, precedents, and judicial rules. The window for scientific literature to enter the courts is narrow, focused, and highly filtered. It serves as a warrant for the expert witnesses\u27 expertise, which in turn makes opinion admissible in a way not available to ordinary witnesses

Writing with Discipline: A Call for Avoiding APA Style Guide Errors in Manuscript Preparation

The education community in the United States—as in many countries—is extremely large and diverse. Indeed, as documented by Mosteller, Nave, and Miech (2004), The United States has more than 3.6 million teachers in elementary and secondary education, more than 100,000 principals, and about 15,000 school districts, each with its own set of district administrators, school board members, and concerned citizens. The parents and family members of the 60 million students in elementary and secondary education represent another constituency, as do the policymakers and legislators in the 50 states (along with the District of Columbia) and at the federal level. Postsecondary education represents another 1 million faculty members, along with an enrollment of 15 million undergraduates and 1.8 million graduate students. (p. 29) Indeed, with the number of individuals involved in the educational system, educational research has the potential to play a pivotal role in improving the quality of education—from Kindergarten through primary, through secondary, through tertiary education. Yet, for educational research to play such a role, its findings must be disseminated to individuals (e.g., educators, administrators, stakeholders, policymakers) and groups (e.g., teacher associations) who can most effectively use them (Mosteller et al., 2004; Onwuegbuzie, Leech, & Whitmore, 2008). Unfortunately, research findings do not disseminate themselves, regardless of how statistically, practically, clinically, or economically significant they are for the field of education. Rather, it is educational researchers in general and practitioner-researchers in particular who must convey these findings

Our Space: Being a Responsible Citizen of the Digital World

Our Space is a set of curricular materials designed to encourage high school students to reflect on the ethical dimensions of their participation in new media environments. Through role-playing activities and reflective exercises, students are asked to consider the ethical responsibilities of other people, and whether and how they behave ethically themselves online. These issues are raised in relation to five core themes that are highly relevant online: identity, privacy, authorship and ownership, credibility, and participation.Our Space was co-developed by The Good Play Project and Project New Media Literacies (established at MIT and now housed at University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism). The Our Space collaboration grew out of a shared interest in fostering ethical thinking and conduct among young people when exercising new media skills

Knowledge organisation in LSP texts and dictionaries: a case study

1noIn LSP dictionaries the specialised knowledge contained and organised in texts is selected and restructured. This paper is focused on the analysis of a case study: the "Dizionario generale plurilingue del Lessico Metalinguistico" (DLM – General Multilingual Dictionary of the Metalinguistic Lexicon). The dictionary of linguistics terminology under examination is planned to complement the reference products available in this area of knowledge. In fact, it has a particular outline as the materials it records are directly drawn from the most representative texts produced throughout the history of linguistic speculation (§ 2.). The plan of the DLM establishes that the terminological information stored (definitions, cross-references, formal variants, translations) is directly drawn from the original texts, and not elaborated by the compilers. Therefore, the definitions of the indexed terms are not produced by terminographers: they are ‘defining quotations’ identified and extracted by specialists from the source texts. Specialised texts play an essential role in this project as they are analysed in order to both identify the core concepts used (or introduced) by their authors and to reconstruct the conceptual networks delineated in each of them. In the compilation of the DLM the problematic issues inherent in textual analysis clearly emerge (§ 3.). This is due to the fact that texts are multifaceted units where the various factors related to their structural organisation and informative content interact. The different degrees of ‘density’ of specialised information which is displayed in texts is determined, among others, by the conceptual, communicative, pragmatic, structural, cognitive, and socio-cultural components of LSP texts (§ 3.1.). The procedures of retrieval and organisation of specialised knowledge carried out in the DLM project are analysed in this study through the consideration of a sub-section of its terminological inventory, i.e. the metalinguistic units extracted from a text in which focal linguistic issues are discussed (§ 4.). Although this book was produced in the pre-scientific period of the history of linguistics, it was chosen because, in addition to providing interesting contributions to linguistics terminology – considered also from a historical viewpoint –, it yields a model for the arrangement of the conceptual relational network which is being implemented for the DLM (§ 4.1.). The bi-dimensional character of terminological records of the DLM is being integrated with graphic representations of conceptual relations, which provide a multidimensional outline to the defining section of this dictionary. The visual representation of relational networks provides further terminological information and it also makes available to the users an effective instrument for acquiring a more thorough understanding of the specialised knowledge which is transferred from LSP texts into this dictionary.openN. LEONARDILeonardi, Natasci