Image - Mike Pearson - Brith Gof
Experiences of collaboration
Experience
Professional field unit 1979-81 NE England. Academic research excavations Wales and Sicily 1994, 1998-2000.
Comments
- I have tried in vain to flatten the typical hierarchical management structure of archaeological field teams - conspicuously so at Monte Polizzo in Sicily (a couple of years of wasted effort).
- In spite of the value of collaboration being a given, there has been little focus on improving orthodox modes of managing collaboration in archaeology, other than through following the availability of new IT - email upwards.
Lab management in the Humanities
Experience
We have a great deal of experience in running team-based hybrid transdiciplinary projects that include diverse interests and abilities - from undergrad to professional and eliding research, pedagogy and publication/manifestation -
Stanford Humanities Lab and Metamedia at Stanford
Scale - Metamedia runs/enables nearly 50 collaboratories involving over 600 people and agencies.
Comments
We have found the following guidelines work:
- collaborate from the start
- clear concept development and communication - to enable commitment/buy in
- this requires a careful choice of transdiciplinary themes/concepts/methodologies that translate well across disciplines
- make pay-off clear (creative insight, efficiency, address to problem et al)
- flatten hierarchies by allowing joint authorship and editing (social software very useful here)
- translate interests so everyone meets their own personal goals
- facilitate modularity and extensibility (so even a minimal input can have effect)
- don't neglect project house-keeping - keep it tidy so everyone can see where they are
- fail quickly to allow adaptive development of the project (agile management)
- foster a culture of risk and experiment (often difficult in relation to orthodox career paths)
- use off-the-shelf solutions and work with the medium until it breaks (don't waste time on dreams of customized media)
- don't be driven by cool technology; IT, tools, instruments are prostheses/augmentations, not substitutes
- instead create a cool "studio" environment
Joint and collaborative authoring
Experience
Analog and digital media. Various projects (all outined elsewhere on this site).
Comments
We have tried various methods:
- literally authoring together at the keyboard - most fascinating experience of this was with the software SubEthaEdit which enables synchronous editing of a shared document (designed for paired software authoring) - several of my blog entries on new media at http://archaeolog.com were written in this way with software engineer Sam Schillace.
- brianstorming/planning followed by editing drafts - whiteboards, big notebooks, big screens useful here for concept mapping - see also the software Curio (the best, I feel, in its class) - wikis too.
- seminar workshop leading to an edited "mashup" - this worked very well indeed with a piece on relativism produced for the journal Archaeological Dialogues by Lampeter Archaeology Workshop. 1996-1997 (I chaired the Department there) - the paper was jointly authored, asynchronously, over many drafts and edits and ran as a discussion piece in the journal with invited comments and a joint response from the authors.
- using asynchronous social software - wikis and blogs - for collated experience and guidelines see - http://documents.stanford.edu/traumwerk/Home - many notes here on the implications for group organization, style, structure ...
- see also now the further possibilites of Web 2.0 - eg http://docs.google.com/ (Schillace again at Google)
Experience
IHUM. Latest class - Human and Machine - [link] - genuine team teaching - faculty presenting together, coordinating closely with fellow-led seminars - complementary pedagogy/class projects on our island in Second Life.
Comments
- don't over prepare lectures
- we always split lectures, adapt what we have to say on the fly - in reacting to what each other says
- key skills - listening and improvising
- indication of role of wiki in the class (of 145 students) - c1000 pages, 1500 attached files and over 250k interactions over 10 weeks.
Experience
Class Eight great archaeological sites - 2005/2006 [link] and 2006/2007 [link]. Part of Stanford's PWR. One of the focal points now of Co-creating cultural heritage - evaluating ways that information and communication technologies can enhance collaborative co-creation of cultural heritage. Wallenberg Global Learning Network 2006-2008.
See also James Collins and Corby Kelly - http://philosophicalstages.org - performance and wiki enabled collaborative learning - part of the WGLN project.
The course outline for Eight Sites has a detailed curriculum that sets out the proposed stages of collaborative learning using social software - wikis - [link]
Comments
- key guidelines are gathered here - http://documents.stanford.edu/traumwerk/27
- add also that most tools for collaboration - social software, participatory media et al - are available off-the-shelf
Experience
Brith Gof a performance arts company. 1993-2007. New genre - performed lectures. Large scale site specific theatre. Small solo works. The Three Landscapes Project - Stanford 2000-2001. Life Squared - with new media artist Lynn Hershman - in the online world Second Life. See also the new archival project - http://brithgof.org - collaborative historiography defining the archival record. The Presence Project - an international project with sixteen performance artists, involving collaboratory documentation.
Comments
- Theater has well developed techniques/methods of rehearsal and improvisation.
- Exhibition/performance deadlines are a great motivation to work together.
- Forcing association/articulation can bring profound insight.
- Brith Gof used both these and a much more "designed" approach to site specific performance using, basically, architectural project management (Cliff McLucas, art director of Brith Gof, was an architect) - concept development, research, CAD design, visualization, sub-contraction.
- Bringing Brith Gof to Stanford was a mixed experience - major problems were with the status of collaborative work in the academy and its relation to career paths - we couldn't fill the interdisciplinary fellowships offered by SHC - it didn't fit with a typical postdoc profile! (The experience might be different now.)
- Credit/authorship are big deals in the arts - and there is no easy solution - but see above on commitment and pay-off.
- The Presence Project collaboratory has raised some insights into copyright and cultural property - the set up of collaborative sharing from the outset meant artists felt more comfortable in sharing their work online (see above on commitment/buy in).
- Presence is a major effort at collaboration at a distance - the partners are spread across thirteen countries and four continents, from the arts, humanities, computer science, public and private sectors. Lesson - ICTs offer augmentation of face to face interaction, not a replacement; important is diversity and richness of interaction (real time, face-to-face, synchronous, asynchronous, high and low bandwidth ...).
Collaborative corporate/academic research
Experience
SHC workshops; DaimlerChrysler - mobile media and the car interior of 2015 - [link] - an industrial affilaition with Stanford Humanities Lab ran 2005-2006
Comments
- see above on lab management
- fascinating clash of research culture, resolved through a wiki (see above) and, crucially, through a multi-disciplinary pragmatic research methodology (ethnography, semiotics, scenario sketching, statistical analysis, foresight modeling).
See also the new group at Stanford - Participatory Media - [link]
Posted at Feb 02/2007 01:15PM:
MS at the meeting: Thomas A Finholt - keynote
topic: infrastructures for collaboration
- network performance is growing very fast
references to Geoff Bowker
cyberinfrastructure (CI) = middleware
he says such technology will lead to advancement of knowledge - identifies cyberstructure is a data instrument
point - barrier to collaboration is access to data - CI addresses this
eg from "big science"
thinking about matching this experience against Humanities
- money is not available for big humanities
- lever open source and off-the-shelf opportunities (customize what is already available, rather than custom build)
recommends looking to -
*collaborative software *high res display and video conferencing - overcoming distance
NB "trust requires touch"
vision -
What if you had a lifesize video window on your collaborators at a distance that was always on, that looked good and realistic, that was HD and widescreen - as if they were in the next room?
- "OptIPortal"/"Presence Portal"
