Mark Liberman’s comments and linkage to Nick Montfort’s take on l’affaire Viswanathan gets me interested in the whole plundergraphia thing (Jason Christie’s Sampling the Culture: 4 Notes Toward a Poetics of Plundergraphia and on Kenneth Goldsmith’s Day is perhaps the essential instantiation).
What’s desperately needed, academically and otherwise, is a suite of tools to HANDLE attribution –the infrastructure to underwrite real 21st century bibliography for the world of ReMix, so that the trails through the jungles of Influence and Source can be made clear, kept clear, seen as the long-run stigmergy that they surely are. The print-oriented apps like RefWorks, EndNote and so on are geared to bibliography construction more than toward management and exploration of one’s hoards of interlinked Information…
This needs thinking about.
One of the most interesting and valuable things about wikipedia are the history pages of each article, where even versions resulting from gross vandalism are preserved for all to view. It should be possible to keep track of the versions and sources of a’ document’ in a kind of attached metadata file.