collaborative writing

While Covid-19 may have fractured our public, private, and professional narratives of normalcy, out of this slow-moving and surreal catastrophe, new images of the future imaginary began to emerge, as well as new creative practices for collaborative (re)imagining. The Digital Literacy Centre is a collective of researcher/academic/artists at the University of British Columbia who are interested in exploring innovative approaches to literacy, digital media research, and experimental methodologies for technologically enriched meaning-making practices and collaboration. Like everyone in the world, each of us in the DLC experienced the pandemic individually as a diffracted and intensely intimate encounter and yet also collectively, as a shared story, one that we were narrating together in real time, however virtually. We decided to take up this evolving pandemic moment as a technological and creative research challenge to engage with the innovative digital platforms at our disposal towards collaborative futures imagining during a time of crisis. Skunk Tales is the result— a multimodal, collaborative futures fiction that we wrote/composed/sonified/and performed in chapters that map an imagined future of human interactions with literate technologies.In this paper, we describe a collaborative, technologically-mediated storying methodology that enacts “the diffraction patterns that arise when specific aural experiences are rubbed against specific narrations of human-technological coupling” (Cecchetto, 2013, p. 3). During our storying sessions, we simultaneously sonified the emergent narrative data using Singling, a Text-to-MIDI (Musial Instrument Digital Interface) linguistic data sonification software. We developed Singling for the sonification and visceralization of textual data in qualitative research and analysis. Capable of sounding discrete characters, symbols, and punctuation, as well as word forms in lexicogrammatical categories of English language texts, Singling transforms text into user-determined soundscapes. As we wrote Skunk Tales, we invited the emergent soundings to permeate the futures imagining and become entangled with the movements of the narrative. As Cecchetto (2013) argued, “It is precisely the forceful quality of sound that makes it an agent of modulation that can help to amplify certain elements of narratives of human-technological coupling, making them audible” (p. 4). This paper maps our creative futures research generation that is informed by technological posthumanism and how “different technologies of text production suggest different models of signification… initiat[ing] new experience of embodiment; and embodied experience interacts with codes of representation to generate new kinds of textual worlds” (Hayles, 1993, p. 69). Sound permeates the methodology and the resulting diffracted narratives, both theoretically, materially, and thematically.We first began the narrative face to face, in the early days of the pandemic, and then diffracted outwards into social isolation and virtual jam sessions; we extended the narrative beyond the limits of our collective and into a storying performance at the 2020 Artful Inquiry Research Group virtual conference, during which we wrote and sonified a chapter live in virtual space. As such, Skunk Tales is a pandemic tale, sounding the evolution of a future now receding into the past, while simultaneously signifying new possibilities for dynamic arts-based conversations between subjectivities, technologies, sounds, and meanings.

(Source: authors' own abstract)

This session explored how excel spreadsheets can become a multilayered narrative writing format.

The second of the monthly 2020 Virtual ELO Salons was held via Zoom on Tuesday, March  10.  Dutch artist and writer Annie Abrahams (living in France), who had volunteered to facilitate the second ELO Virtual Salon, proposed a “reariting” session using Zoom and the collaborative writing environment Framapad centered on “Extra-terrestrial Rhetoric,” a multimedia text by Lily Robert-Foley a writer and translator who is an active member of Outranspo: a motley group of multilingual translators, writers, researchers and musicians who joyously devote themselves to creative approaches to translation, primarily through monthly virtual meetings. http://www.outranspo.com/

Explaining why she proposed this text and a “reariting” approach to it, Abrahams commented, “‘reariting’ is the act of simultaneous reading and writing together on the Internet. This session, which is based on the ideas explored in my Reading Club project that I developed with Emmanuel Guez, is not about producing a text together, but about using ‘reariting’ as a technique to think through a text together.  In the process we will produce a new text with an undetermined status that we will collectively discuss after our rewriting session.” 

To facilitate the session, Abrahams, via the group Zoom call, first briefly introduced Robert-Foley’s work and then sent the essay “Extra-terrestrial Rhetoric” to each of he participants via e-mail.  The text, a four page document that, at first, appears to be an academic article about translation strategies, slowly reveals itself as something that may not be what it at first appears to be.  With time, the reader becomes aware that if what they are reading is an academic article it is quite unlike anything they have read before. Each participant read the text and then “met” up in the Framapad collaborative writing environment, where they explained and explored their understandings, misunderstandings, reactions to, and asides related to the text they had just read.  After one hour, the participants reconnected on Zoom to review, discuss, and evaluate the experience, the process, and the results.

This dissertation examines how social network site (SNS) platforms enhance writers’ experiences of pleasure and play in the process of writing together. My primary site of study is Protagonize.com, a SNS that encourages member-generated collaborative creative writing. Correlating Bakhtin’s theory of utterance, Huizinga’s understanding of play, and Wittgenstein’s concept of language games, I argue that Protagonize.com allows writers to engage in writing practices where authorship becomes inherently collaborative, context adapts to users’ needs, and the social-dimension of language emerges.

This paper will present Letter to an Unknown Soldier, a new kind of war memorial, made entirely of words. Created by writers Neil Bartlett and Kate Pullinger, the project was commissioned by Britain’s 14-18 NOW to mark the centenary of the outbreak of WW1. Inspired by Charles Jagger’s 1922 bronze statue of a soldier, who stands on Platform One of Paddington Station, London, reading a letter, the digital artwork invited everyone in the country to write their own letter to the soldier.

Letter to an Unknown Soldier began with letters commissioned from 50 well-known UK-based writers; it opened to the public for submissions from mid-May 2014, and all the letters received to date went online on 28 June (the centenary of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand). The website remained open for submissions for 37 days, until 4 August (the centenary of Britain’s declaration of war). The project quickly snowballed in popularity. By its close, more than 21,400 letters had been received from around the world.

Letter to an Unknown Soldier now stands as an extraordinary example of a crowd-sourced participatory media artwork written by thousands of people who don’t think of themselves as writers. It forms a vivid snapshot of what people think about war, and what it means to remember a war no longer within lived experience.

Website address: www.1418now.org/letter

Letter to an Unknown Soldier directly disrupts Britain’s increasingly hegemonic and nostalgic approach to commemorating war. In the UK, Remembrance Day, which marks the end of WW1, morphed into Remembrance Sunday, which became Remembrance Weekend, which is now in the process of becoming Remembrance Week. Heavily ritualised and pre-programmed, we are expected to remember war by watching the Queen at the Cenotaph on television, by wearing red poppies, and by observing the two minutes of official silence. Letter to an Unknown Soldier gave people the opportunity to speak into that silence by posing the following questions: What does it mean to remember something you can’t remember? If you could say whatever you wanted to say to the unknown soldier, what would you say?

Letter to an Unknown Soldier was an international transmedia writing event. Spread across many platforms – Twitter, Facebook, Wattpad, Figment, Tumblr, YouTube and Storify – but always focussed on the digital artwork itself, it has generated layers of data that transform the notion of the war memorial from something static to a work that reflects both lived and living experience. The diversity of responses to the project was both unusual and inspiring, including submissions from schoolchildren, serving soldiers, a huge range of the public, as well as the current British Prime Minister. We asked people to write a letter to the soldier and they responded, in their thousands.

During the project, Harper Collins UK commissioned a book of selected letters: this book includes 138 of the letters and was published in November 2014. Over the next few months the website, and all its digital traces and residues, will be transformed into both an archive of the artwork and an open access resource for educators and community organisations; using the archive, the British Library has created a dataset for researchers. This presentation will show the work as well as describing how it was made, how it was disseminated, and the future of the project.

(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)