Content Generation in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

This article reconsiders the role of compiling in the modern history of authorship. Nineteenth-century readers viewed compiling as the purest form of "book-making," a mechanistic, market-oriented model of authorship that stood in opposition to authorial genius. The article examines these authorial models' intertwined origins in emergent industrial capitalism, and argues that book-making retained currency as a model into the early twentieth century partly because unattributed text reuse remained common. It also argues that in the aggregate, unattributed text reuse had epistemic and informational effects that anticipated challenges we are grappling with following the development of large language models.