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Credit: Who Gets Named

8 courses. Start with the first one, then take whichever of the 4 tracks you want: they run in parallel, and none of them needs another.

How to read the course codes
  • -00 means start here.
  • -01, -02 are steps on one path, in order.
  • A letter (-T1, -P2) marks a track. Tracks run in parallel: take any track you like, in any order, without taking the others.
  • -99 is the capstone. Take it last.

Start here

  1. CREDIT-00

    Who Gets Named

    Start here. Everything else in this series assumes it.

    Doing the work and being named for it are two different events. They happen at different times, they leave different records, and the second one is decided by machinery you can learn. This course teaches that machinery: the Matthew effect, which sends credit to whoever is already eminent; the Matilda effect, which routes a woman's contribution to a male colleague; the authorship conventions that decide who goes on the paper and who is thanked underneath it; the split in patent law between the humans who must be named and the company that owns the result; the four moments at which an archive goes quiet; and how a correction actually happens, who does it, how long it takes, and what it can and cannot repair. Six people carry the evidence: Pauli Murray, whose argument the Brown litigation used; Vivien Thomas, who built an operation he was not permitted to author; Henrietta Lacks, whose cells were taken and whose name was replaced with a false one; Annie Turnbo Malone, whose business records mostly did not survive; Claudette Colvin, whom a movement chose not to name; and Selma Burke, whose claim on the dime has never been settled either way. Where the evidence is genuinely argued, this course teaches the argument and names who holds which position, because a dispute closed by assertion is not history.

The path

  1. CREDIT-01

    Who Gets the Credit: Black Inventors and the Machinery of Attribution

    Step 1 on the single path through this series.

    Ideas get taken. Names get lost. But the interesting question is not whether that happened to Black inventors, which it plainly did, but HOW it happened, because the mechanism is a system you can learn and then use. This course teaches that system first: what a patent actually granted, who was legally permitted to hold one and when, the 1858 opinion that barred enslaved inventors and their enslavers alike, the Confederate answer to it, the assignment clause that moves a patent to an employer on the day it issues, and the several distinct ways a name disappears from work it did. Then it works through the verified cases with their documentation, patent numbers and dates included, from Thomas Jennings in 1821 to Lonnie Johnson in 1986. Then it does the thing most treatments of this subject refuse to do: it names the famous claims in this genre that do not survive checking, says what the evidence actually shows instead, and teaches you to run that check yourself in about ten minutes. A reader who can defend every claim they make is worth more to this history than a reader carrying a longer list.

  2. CREDIT-02

    Who Signs the Print

    Step 2 on the single path through this series.

    A fine art print is made by at least two people: the artist who makes the image, and the master printer who makes the edition. Only one of them signs it. That is not a rule about race, and getting that right is the whole point of this course, because the convention applies to every master printer who has ever worked, which means the medium itself manufactures a category of expertise the public cannot see. The interesting question is who ends up in that category, and what they build once they are there. This course teaches the convention end to end: what a pencil signature actually certifies (approval, not authorship, and it dates only from the second half of the nineteenth century), where the printer's credit really lives (an embossed chop that carries no name, and a documentation sheet the public never reads), and what a printer owns instead of a signature (the bon a tirer, the proof the whole edition must match). Then it follows Robert Blackburn, hired in 1957 as the first master printer at Universal Limited Art Editions, who printed its first seventy-nine editions, all of which carry other artists' signatures, and who answered the convention by building an open workshop rather than by arguing with it. Elizabeth Catlett answered it with a collective, Margaret Taylor-Burroughs with a museum, AfriCOBRA with a cheap and portable medium, Charles White with a classroom, and Emma Amos with a print portfolio that got her into a room she was the only woman in. The shape transfers: session musicians, ghostwriters, film colourists, translators and test kitchens are governed by the same three conditions, and the course ends by teaching you to spot them, and by showing two credit conventions that were actually corrected.

  3. CREDIT-03

    The Name on the Door

    Step 3 on the single path through this series.

    A building is credited to a firm, and a firm is named after whoever owns it. That one sentence explains more about architectural credit than any story about a stolen design, because it means the public credit line for a building answers a legal and contractual question rather than the question readers think they are asking. This course teaches the convention end to end: what a credit line actually names, what a licensed architect's seal certifies and what it does not, and why the architect of record and the design architect are two different jobs that only sometimes belong to the same person. Then it adds the second gate. Architectural licensure began in Illinois in 1897 and spread state by state, and it is real public-safety regulation with a real body count behind it, but it is also a gate, and the education and paid-experience steps behind it ran through admissions offices and hiring decisions. Julian Abele is the case, and the popular version of him is wrong in specific and checkable ways. He was chief designer in Horace Trumbauer's office and took the firm over after Trumbauer died, but employees there did not sign, and when he applied to the American Institute of Architects in 1942 the only buildings he could list as his own were his sister's house and the Duke work. That single document is worth more than the myth ever was. The course also refuses the flattering errors: he was not a servant, he was not the sole architect of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and there is no record that he attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Norma Merrick Sklarek, Beverly Loraine Greene, Georgia Louise Harris Brown, Paul Revere Williams and Robert R. Taylor carry the rest of the argument, and the course ends where credit conventions can actually be changed: a cornerstone recut to carry two names, an award rule that admits two people instead of one, and a ledger of what this course tested and refused to print.

WRI · The written record track

  1. CREDIT-WRI1

    Written by Himself

    Step 1 of the WRI · The written record track. Tracks run in parallel: you can take this one without taking the others.

    A byline is not a report of who wrote something. It is a term in an agreement, and the title page is where the agreement shows. Ghostwriting is the cleanest place in this catalog to see that, because the writer's name is missing by design and the writer was paid for exactly that: the absence is the deliverable, not a wrong done to anybody. So this course does not call ghostwriting theft, which would be wrong and correctable in public by anyone holding a publishing contract. It asks the harder question instead. Who ends up inside that contract, who ends up outside it, and what does a byline pay that a fee does not? The evidence is free, digitised and out of copyright, and the course reads it directly. Phillis Wheatley's 1773 Poems carries an attestation in its own front matter, signed by eighteen Boston men, certifying that a Black woman wrote her own poems: the credit document and the book are the same object. Frederick Douglass answered the same disbelief from the other direction, by putting the claim in his subtitle. Solomon Northup's book was edited by David Wilson, Omar ibn Said wrote his in Arabic in 1831, and Abby Fisher dictated hers because she could not write. Elizabeth Keckley took the byline and was punished for it, and was doubted anyway. And Harriet Jacobs is the model correction the whole series needs: her book was read as Lydia Maria Child's for roughly a century, and Jean Fagan Yellin restored it to Jacobs using Jacobs's own letters. Four of the strongest documents here are books by Black women whose authorship was disputed, which makes women the argument rather than an addendum. The course ends in the present tense, with the as-told-to trade, the collaborator credit ladder, and a deliberate refusal: where the record does not name the writer, this course does not guess.

REC · The record track

  1. CREDIT-REC1

    Who Made the Record: Photography, Custody, and the Credit Line

    Step 1 of the REC · The record track. Tracks run in parallel: you can take this one without taking the others.

    A photograph of a person looks like something that happened. It is something somebody did, and this course follows the paperwork that decision leaves behind: who commissioned the picture, who was paid, whose name went in the caption, who owned the plate afterwards, and who is allowed to say no. It is a credit course, not a craft course, and it teaches nobody to take a photograph. It runs from Frederick Douglass, who published a theory of the record before he sat for one, through Kodak's Shirley card, where a technical default stopped looking like a decision, to the 1850 daguerreotypes Louis Agassiz commissioned in South Carolina, a record made about seven enslaved people to argue something about them. It then reads three credit lines a learner can go and check today: an archive that names Ella Watson, a museum catalogue that grades its own certainty with the words attributed to, and an acquisition record that three published accounts date to three different years. It ends on two claims made on one archive, Carrie Mae Weems against Harvard in the 1990s and Tamara Lanier against Harvard from 2019, taught as the pair they are, with the legal posture kept intact rather than smoothed into a story about who won. Every contested claim here is taught as contested with the holders named, and where this course could not reach a source it says so instead of guessing.

CHO · Choreography track

  1. CREDIT-CHO1

    Black creators in dance, and the copyright that would not hold them

    Step 1 of the CHO · Choreography track. Tracks run in parallel: you can take this one without taking the others.

    Choreography was not a copyrightable category in the United States until 1 January 1978. Before that date a dance could be registered only if it passed as a dramatic composition, in Class D, which meant it had to tell a story or develop a character, and the rule came from a case a white dancer lost in 1892. After that date it could be registered only if it was fixed: written, notated or filmed. A dance that was danced and never written down was, in law, never a work at all. This course teaches that mechanism from the documents themselves, the 1909 Act, the Copyright Office's own Compendium, Circular 52, and the opinions in Horgan v. Macmillan and Hanagami v. Epic Games, and then reads the archive against it. You will open the Library of Congress finding aid for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater Collection to a box of contracts and read four Black choreographers' names on four folder headings, one of them with a royalties schedule laid in and one of them closed to researchers until the year 2100. You will compare the two folders that hold what survives of the choreography of Revelations with the two boxes that hold its choral scores. And you will price a Labanotation score, because a score is not only a record, it is a revenue instrument, and every choreographer who was never notated was excluded from it. Nothing here is asserted that was not read from a source. Where the popular story is wrong, including about Alvin Ailey and about Janet Collins, the correction is the lesson.

SCI · Science track

  1. CREDIT-SCI1

    Esther Lederberg: The Technique, the Phage, and the Record

    Step 1 of the SCI · Science track. Tracks run in parallel: you can take this one without taking the others.

    Esther Miriam Zimmer Lederberg developed replica plating, discovered bacteriophage lambda, and found the fertility factor that explained how bacteria mate. Molecular biology runs on all three. This course teaches the science first, in that order, because the alternative order is the problem: introduce her as somebody's wife and the work becomes the footnote, which is exactly the move the record shows being made about her for fifty years. Only after you can say what replica plating does and why a turbid plaque mattered does the course open the attribution question, and then it opens it with paperwork rather than outrage: the exact motivation of the 1958 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine and the exact shares, the Nobel Foundation's own 1958 biography of the laureate, which mentions her in a marriage sentence and gives her job title as research associate, and the author lines of the papers themselves, checked one by one against the journals' own records. It also teaches the limits. The Nobel statutes cap a prize at three people and that prize already had three names, so the honest question is about how credit was allocated across a career and a literature, not a verdict on a committee whose deliberations nobody can read. The frame is the Matilda effect, named by Margaret Rossiter in 1993 and measured across thirteen scientific societies in 2012. And because getting it wrong in her favour makes the true record easier to dismiss, the last lesson corrects the corrections.