Genres without Writers: Information Systems and Distributed Authorship

Abstract

Originality/value

In demonstrating “writerless” phenomena of genre change in distributed, regulated systems, this essay complements and extends the strong body of existing work in genre studies that emphasizes the writer’s perspective and agency in its accounts of genre development. By showing how continually evolving compound documents such as digital libraries constitute such sites of unacknowledged genre change, this essay demonstrates how the social actions that these composite documents facilitate for their users also change.

Citation

Feinberg, M. (2015), "Genres without Writers: Information Systems and Distributed Authorship", Genre Theory in Information Studies (Studies in Information, Vol. 11), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Bingley, pp. 43-66. https://doi.org/10.1108/S2055-537720140000011004