Collaborative Constructions
The ubiquitous interconnectedness of the world wide web, the nature of exchange taking place in social software environments, and networking behaviors like email and text messaging, have spawned a type of book that incorporates these new modes of thinking, imagining, understanding, and interacting. I've been calling this unique form of collaboration the networked book.
We can begin with a print-based model by first identifying certain electronic Collaborative Constructions with journals-- serialized collections of works by several authors. But, of course, it's not such a simple one-to-one equivalency-- the electronic version takes it a step farther through reader participation. Where many web sites, and in particular blogs, make use of reader commenting as a dialogic frame, Derek Powazek's fray is more fundamentally authored not only by the nominal contributors to each issue but as well by readers posting responsive stories that build on particular pieces. Here the Comments tool is used as a collaborative authoring device, leading to potentially open-ended expansion-- for which there is no real equivalent parallel in the print-based world.
Non-fiction is also fertile ground for networked collaborative constructions. Lawrence Lessig's Code v.2 uses a wiki to open the editing process of the second edition of Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace to the public in order to "draw upon the creativity and knowledge of the community. This is an online, collaborative book update; a first of its kind. Once the project nears completion, Professor Lessig will take the contents of this wiki and ready it for publication." In other words, at some point the book will be declared finished and closed to further input and adjustment by the community. By contrast, the popular Wikipedia, an online wiki encyclopedia whose entries can be written and edited by anyone, remains entirely and indefinitely open.
Mechanical aggregators and reassemblers of granular content can sometimes be considered networked books. For example, Jonathan Harris' 10 x 10 builds its content from RSS feeds. The program selects the most frequently used words from the major news networks to assemble an hourly "portrait" of our world. I would argue that this visualization tool represents a type of structure that we will soon see in networked books. The human editor/programmer creates a search and visualization function that collects, edits, and presents large data sets according to the criteria built into the program.
We can begin with a print-based model by first identifying certain electronic Collaborative Constructions with journals-- serialized collections of works by several authors. But, of course, it's not such a simple one-to-one equivalency-- the electronic version takes it a step farther through reader participation. Where many web sites, and in particular blogs, make use of reader commenting as a dialogic frame, Derek Powazek's fray is more fundamentally authored not only by the nominal contributors to each issue but as well by readers posting responsive stories that build on particular pieces. Here the Comments tool is used as a collaborative authoring device, leading to potentially open-ended expansion-- for which there is no real equivalent parallel in the print-based world.
Non-fiction is also fertile ground for networked collaborative constructions. Lawrence Lessig's Code v.2 uses a wiki to open the editing process of the second edition of Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace to the public in order to "draw upon the creativity and knowledge of the community. This is an online, collaborative book update; a first of its kind. Once the project nears completion, Professor Lessig will take the contents of this wiki and ready it for publication." In other words, at some point the book will be declared finished and closed to further input and adjustment by the community. By contrast, the popular Wikipedia, an online wiki encyclopedia whose entries can be written and edited by anyone, remains entirely and indefinitely open.
Mechanical aggregators and reassemblers of granular content can sometimes be considered networked books. For example, Jonathan Harris' 10 x 10 builds its content from RSS feeds. The program selects the most frequently used words from the major news networks to assemble an hourly "portrait" of our world. I would argue that this visualization tool represents a type of structure that we will soon see in networked books. The human editor/programmer creates a search and visualization function that collects, edits, and presents large data sets according to the criteria built into the program.
posted by sat at 10:33 AM
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