JAF Fellowship Breakfast
Collaboration and Authorship
Professor Ann Blair, Harvard History Department
Professor Blair’s recently published book traces how scholars and authors relied on the help of writing assistants from antiquity down to the 20th century when machines and software began to replace them. The book focuses especially on examples from Europe in the later Renaissance (1500-1650) to examine what we can learn about these assistants, who they were, how they worked, and when and why they become visible in the surviving sources. In our discussion, we will explore the various forms that collaboration takes today in knowledge-making and text-writing, and current practices of assigning credit in publications. Then we can ponder together the implications of AI: under what circumstances might AI be considered a collaborator or a co-author?