Medical device manufacturers and other high-technology companies increasingly incorporate algorithmic data surveillance in next-generation medical wearables. These devices, including hearing aids, leverage patient data created through human-computer interaction to not only power devices but also increase corporate profits. Although data protection laws establish privacy requirements for personal information collection and use, these companies continue to use patients’ personal information with little notice or education, significantly curtailing the agency of wearers. We explore the complex ecology of the Starkey Halo smart hearing aid, focusing on the opacity of its algorithmic functionality and examining patient education materials for disclosures of data surveillance. We contextualize these findings within privacy law in the United States and European Union that are relevant to algorithmic surveillance and recommend specific steps to enhance wearer agency through informed decision-making.

Advertisements for hearing aids often tout the “invisible” nature of their product, designed to obscure visible markers of disability. This essay examines mid-century appeals to women hearing-aid wearers, emphasizing the labor of embodied and cognitive passing in kairotic spaces as well as practical rhetorical implications of human/machine integration, both of which continue to apply in contemporary contexts.

Visibility is strategic. Visibility is insistent. Visibility is an argument—for disabled people, an argument for recognition and rights, a demand to be part of the public and participants in public...

This study examines design aspects that shape human/machine collaboration between wearers of smart hearing aids and their networked aids. The Starkey Halo hearing aid and the TruLink iPhone app that facilitates real-time adjustments by the wearer offer a case study in designing for this sort of collaboration and for the wearer's rhetorical management of disability disclosure in social contexts. Through close textual analysis of the company's promotional materials for patient and professional audiences as well as interface analysis and autoethnography, I examine the ways that close integration between the wearer, onboard algorithms and hardware, and geolocative telemetry shape everyday interactions in multiple hearing situations. Reliance on ubiquitous, familiar hardware such as smart phones and intuitive interface design can drive patient comfort and adoption rates of these complex technologies that influence cognitive health, social connectedness, and crucial information access.

This article explores textual curation as a conceptualization of authorship and composition within large information structures that is heavily based on the canon of arrangement. This work is often undertaken through distributed collaboration, thus complicating traditional conceptions of authorial attribution and agency. Central curatorial processes include critical recomposition of prior texts along with the development of small and often invisible textual elements such as architecture, metadata, and strategic links. I offer a grounded definition of textual curation that draws from traditional curatorial fields such as Museum Studies and Library Science as well as Writing Studies’ own subfield of Technical Communication, which focuses heavily on recomposed, collaboratively produced texts. Selected Wikipedia articles serve as case studies for examining live curatorial work in open, collaborative environments.

This article examines natural metaphors for authorship and ownership in the 1728 Chambers’s Cyclopædia, an influential precursor to and source for today’s encyclopedias. Carefully situating Chambers’s chosen metaphors of the honeybee and the daw within both historical and genre contexts reveals important nuances of authorial originality in reference texts that are most often understood as explicitly non-original and uncreative. His decisions concerning intellectual property were driven by his understanding of the transformative aspects of encyclopedic authorship and his ethical positioning of the encyclopedist as a gatherer and distributor of knowledge. His use of the honeybee as a metaphor for encyclopedic authorship demonstrates a rhetorical astuteness that draws from England’s rich apiary tradition as well as deeply British symbolism that positioned the honeybee as royal, moral, and virtuous. Taken together, Chambers’s argument demonstrates the need for careful attention to situated, historical factors in discussions of authorship and ownership.

This special issue of College English brings together well-established scholars of intellectual property as they present fresh work to the field. Their essays offer wide-ranging, provocative explorations of intellectual property as a cultural artifact over the past three centuries.