The text below is an image.
It is easy to ‘capture’ text. The act of copying, here through the snipping tool, means I do not have to type these words any longer in order to get the writing on the screen. Writing and typing can be replaced by taking images. Where previously words were keyed in, letter by letter, I can now offer a simulation of the physical act.
The written word can be ‘authored’ based on the following definition,blurring writing, constructing, originating.
Definition of author
au·thor (ô
th
r)
a. The writer of a book, article, or other text.
b. One who practices writing as a profession.
2. One who writes or constructs an electronic document or system, such as a website.
3. An originator or creator, as of a theory or plan.
4. Author God.
tr.v. au·thored, au·thor·ing, au·thors
1. Usage Problem To assume responsibility for the content of (a published text).
2. To write or construct (an electronic document or system): authored the company’s website.
An author, can now be understood as the individual who writes the words, a creator, someone who builds the web page, but not necessarily writes the contents.
By the way I did not ‘write’ any of the above, I ‘appropriated’, which here, means ‘cut and paste’ but I did ‘author’ the post.
you can capture without typing – but capturing (at least as an image) might strip the writing of its ‘machine readability’ – and therefore take it out of the web in some meaningful way. I find this interesting in relation to metadata – when we talk about digital objects (e.g. digitisations of museum objects), should we be including their metadata – what makes them machine-readable? Is the metadata part of the digital artefact?