Panel: Collaboration: Intended, Unintended, by Whom, and for Whom? •
Sarimanok Room
Copanelists: Kamaoli Kuwada and Sandra Lindemann
The re-publication of George Foster’s Voyage round the World by the University of Hawai‘i Press in 2000, which I jointly edited with Nicholas Thomas, preceded the widespread adoption of Wikipedia as an on-line research tool. Having written the biographical part of the introduction of the print volume, I found myself at first dismayed at discovering that parts of the English Wikipedia entry on George Forster had freely plagiarized my writing. But while I was still pondering whether and what kind of action I should take as an academic author confronted with a challenge to his copyright in an untried social environment, I became intrigued by the vandalism to which the entry of Forster was being subjected. Claimed by Polish nationalists as one of their own, I found that place names as well as material information about Forster had become a contested subject to such an extent that intervention by Wikipedia authorities had become necessary.
As of this writing, little would alert the uninitiated eye to the fractious battles that surrounded the creation of the entry on Forster. It is currently marked as a “featured article” in Wikipedia. Making visible the process of how its biographic information was shaped in this new social environment should be an interesting example for the ways in which translation between media (print and electronic media) and languages, (Polish, German, and English) necessitates a re-thinking of received assumptions about the ways lives are written.
Oliver Berghof is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at California State University at San Marcos. He has researched and published on early modern European travelers, including the entries on Tahiti in the Literature of Travel and Exploration: An Encyclopedia (2003) and Interpreting Colonialism (2004), and has translated works by Isidore of Seville and Hegel.