Title
From the Personal to the Proprietary: Conceptual Writing’s Critique of Metadata
Author
Paul Stephens
Columbia University
Source
DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly
Volume 6 Number 2 (2012)
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Abstract
The past decade has seen a remarkable proliferation of new works of constrained and appropriated writing that prominently incorporate, and in turn investigate, metadata schemes. I argue that these works ought to be of considerable interest not only to critics of contemporary avant-garde writing — but also to media theorists, librarians and textual scholars. By emphasizing classification protocols, conceptual writing makes an implicit case for the interrelationship of these fields. Each of the four main books under discussion here — Tan Lin’s Seven Controlled Vocabularies, Craig Dworkin’s Perverse Library, M. Nourbese Philip’s Zong! and Simon Morris’ Getting Inside Jack Kerouac’s Head — draws upon pre-existing textual archives. In doing so, these books suggest that processes of data storage, classification and transmission are key to how poetry is created, recognized and disseminated. Conceptual writing’s attention to information classification protocols offers not only a critique of contemporary models of authorship, but also of contemporary frameworks of personal agency and intellectual property.
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