5

Discussing collaboration and it's different mediums of presentation led my interest to peak when the blogpost discussed the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank. I agree with Nial in that crowdsourcing is the best way to establish a uniform trust, but have to say that traditional collaboration represents a more important position in the University.

I believe the discussion on co authorship in the liberal arts is spot on. The traditional understanding of writing is that it is a solitary thing. Lonely and alone you are meant to face your thoughts and be able to produce. Unlike the ordered Sciences, where different technicians can work out different aspects of a problem, in liberal arts the author controls all means of access. The privacy involved and the loss of potential collaboration is sad, but hope remains in things like instant visual translation technology and other methods of instantaneous, non mutual language discourse.