The_Meta4

This blog is not dead. I am on the academic job market, which is consuming almost all of the energy I have.

Compliments of Wordle, of course.

My first article has been accepted, pending revisions that I am working on now. The piece is about the relationship of poker writing to intellectual property concerns. If you want to see the draft and provide feedback, please send me an email.

Our proposed panel the Conference on College Composition and Communication has been accepted.

I have two articles under review at the moment as well. One of them is my writing sample on the job market. Feel free to email me for a copy.

This paper draws from a digital ethnography of the writing practices of professional online poker players to argue that “intellectual property” concerns have saturated their everyday composing activity as they self-publish and sell digital texts. The history of authorship in the West has been bound to various manifestations of copyright and intellectual property conditions. Because of this, authorship is emerging as a central analytic concept to help understand the rise and impact of “write culture,” as everyday web composers must now negotiate copyright and intellectual property concerns. I argue that in the world of online poker, copyright protection becomes conflated with “idea protection” as ebook authors and their readers manipulate their writing practices to arrest the flow of information to the commons. By calling attention to the way “socially rivalrous” information influences ebook production and dissemination, I illustrate how a full understanding of the dynamics of intellectual property on the web might also require close attention to the composing practices of self-published authors, who may not necessarily have the resources or desire to police copyright infringement through legal channels. Additionally, understanding the literacy practices and processes that contributed to textual production can help conceptualize how authors preserve proprietorship over digital texts by limiting information flows to the commons.

My next presentation will be at the AOIR conference in Milwaukee. The conference will take place Oct. 7-10. My paper will be about how protecting information through copyright protection and “idea protection” influences the dissemination of ebooks.

This blog will be up and running shortly. If you want to see the old blog and archives, you can click here.