Friday, October 14, 2016

Who Owns What

      The past couple of weeks in Digital Humanities has made me rethink the past three or four years of my upper-level writing career. Although short, I can securely say that I have had ideas of intellectual property and ownership jammed into my brain-- for lack of a better phrase. Since high school it has always been "give credit where credit is due" and "you may rephrase something, but you must notify your reader where the idea came from." Reading pieces where artists take the work and words of others without paying credit and making it their own gives me a strange feeling of insecurity as well as freedom, and I have to wonder if this is what change within the humanities feels like in real time. Artist Alison Clifford manipulates the work of poet e.e.cummings into works that depict landscapes that grow as the reader interacts with them in her piece "The Sweet Old Etcetera". Although created and thought of by Clifford, the words are written by cummings. Similarly, the work "Camel Tail" was created by artist Sonny Rae Tempest; however, the software its text is generated from was created by Nick Montfort, and the text was written by Metallica.




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