BP5: Nial C. DeMena

Collaboration, as it is defined in OED is to "work jointly on an activity, esp. to produce or create something" and secondarily to "cooperate traitorously with an enemy." These are funny to juxtapose. They also highlight two schools of thought alluded to in the question asked of us.

Up to a point, collaboration works. You trust the editors, your peers, and whomever you worked with on whatever scholarship or project brought into being. It is, suffice to say, a novel use of technology. Having read many pedagogical essays co-authored by two, three, sometimes even four separate writers, I can see the value in establishing consensus and in clarity, after all, who isn't going to jump ship if their ideas are not expressed patently in a piece with their name on it. Similarly, if ten or fifteen of your peers disagree with you wholesale, your work probably shouldn't for the time being be published. Collaboration, though, is not quite crowdsourcing.

Crowdsourcing I like better; Android applications work this way as do video game mods as does level design for video games in certain situations, e.g. LittleBigPlanet and LittleBigPlanet 2. even the army has crowd sourced some of its tougher problems to the public. It works better because its collaboration with direction, it saves money, time, and engages the public (or discourse community) in a way that's new and exciting.

Like Meaghan says, the system of citations under which we work as scholars constitutes collaboration. If there was some stable build of a visual archive, where one could see in unity a discourse, its off-shoots, and all the scholars responsible, that would be amazing as it would be railed against. Insofar as we do and are constantly producing, I think collaborative scholarship should include crowdsourcing problems as well as the General Public License (GPL)  model of property licensing. That way, scholars working under the same general discourse at the same time could communicate, elaborate, and collaborate with each other in real time as they were constructing their final essays or books. One could open up, free, oneself from the scholarly boundaries of irrelevance and obsolescence by picking up the tempo, and engaging more in the process of scholarship, which is way, way to product oriented. The group will always be smarter than the individual, and having these living works of scholarship, while allowing for the protection of your specific intellectual property/contribution to the field, will be better for everyone, as Robert has too argued.


The one concern I have is when one man or woman comes along with a game-changing idea, if it's still possible. That person will no doubt, due to the extreme position of disagreement with the establishment and the canon, have a tough time under such a rubric.


Concluding, I think crowdsourcing academic and/or scholarly problems needs to happen as much as scholarship need to open up and collaborate with the world. The GPL model works especially well for this type of scholarship, and seeing how it would make us better, faster, and allow us to communicate our ideas as they happen, transparency, why not do it? Collaboration as we see it--two or three people banging heads over one paper--is dated but collaboration in terms of crowdsourcing and, more importantly, in terms of the opening up of process in scholarship to other scholars who might be interested, has a definite future in the academy.