All Together Now: Collective Knowledge, Collective Narratives, and Architectures of Participation

• “Bush envisioned “a new profession of trailblazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record.”” ⤴️
  • Ted Nelson on hypertext
    • “Nelson considers the absent link, the lacuna, to be as important as those already forged: Within bodies of writing, everywhere, there are linkages we tend not to see.” ⤴️
    • “new methods of organizing material that could coexist simultaneously with extant systems.” ⤴️
    • “One limitation of the system Nelson imagined was that the core technologies would remain centralized.” ⤴️
    • ‘constructive’ hypertext as living documents

breakdown

1

• Being in the world Vs being together in the world
• me + my context Vs me and my context and you and your context

3

• Absent links as missing archives as social justice work. gaps as potential
• Preserving current linkages and allowing new

4

• understanding the participatory nature of constructive hypertext
• Michael Joyce-
  • Exploratory hypertexts as traditional static texts with annotations not modifying the stable original and constructive hypertexts where the structure and contents are fluctuating. exploratory hypertexts start as constructive.

5 - 12

• (Literary analysis and specific works)
• 1993-1996 Hypertext Hotel “the hotel offered a spatial metaphor for a collaborative writing event” - collaborative worldbuilding as the most pluralistic web-writing practise. eg SCP Foundation
• living documents as ‘a writing event, anarchistic in nature’

13 tagging - individuals tag for themselves first, through emergent clusters, comparison etc across publicised tags and links, a coherent emergent folksonomy can emerge from personomies - write for yourself by default - Feral Hypertext- Walker argues that tagging systems allow for emergent connections. Clustering - Collective value as by-product (Tim O’Reilly )

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extracts

• “In the domain of electronic literature, the collaborative effort involved in creating, publishing and distributing works is more clearly evident,” ⤴️

• “There are few traditional publishers of electronic literature, so there is no apparatus in place to keep the labor of producing and distributing the work invisible.” ⤴️

• visible by default, invisible by suppression

• “When we are with others, we are always something other than what we are when we are alone.” ⤴️

• “In the phenomenological approach he describes in Being and Time, Heidegger distinguishes between Da-sein, being in the world, and Mitda-sein, the state of being-together-in-the-world” ⤴️

• “In discussing how we arrive at consensus, Habermas writes of “linguistically generated intersubjectivity,” the use of language to create a subject that is not the self, but subjectivity shared with others” ⤴️

• “Luhmann, in Social Systems, argues that people are not society, but parts of its environment” ⤴️

• “whenever people are collaborating on a project of knowledge sharing or creative production, they are collaborating not only with other people, but with a system which they, the other participants, and the communicative environment help to create.” ⤴️

• “In networked computer environments in particular, collaboration is always both collaboration with other people and with systems.” ⤴️

• “From the moment the idea of associative linking was conceptualized, hypertext has been associated with collective knowledge.” ⤴️

• “literary culture operates in a manner that makes the contributions of those involved in the production and distribution of books, other than the author, less visible.” ⤴️

• “the Memex, the stand-alone device imagined by Vannevar Bush in his 1946 essay “As We May Think,” was based on the idea of making collective knowledge available to individuals in new associative ways.” ⤴️

• “The operator of the Memex would record the trails of associations he constructed over the course of his research.” ⤴️

• “These trails would then become the foundation of further research by others” ⤴️

• “Bush envisioned “a new profession of trailblazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record.”” ⤴️

• “we might usefully think of the Wikipedia as one example of the “new forms of encyclopaedias” Bush envisioned, “with a mesh of associative trails running through them”” ⤴️

• “Nelson describes a hypertext system based on the idea that each field has a “literature,” a “system of interconnected writings,” persistent but open to constant expansion: In our Western cultural tradition, writings in principle remain continuously available—both as recently quoted, and in their inviolable incarnations—in a great precession. [28] Nelson asserts that individual researchers always have their own thought-trail of associative links through a given body of material.” ⤴️

• “a field’s collective view of its own past is furthermore subject to constant reinterpretation.” ⤴️

• Ted Nelson on hypertext

  • “Nelson bases the file system of Xanadu on the idea that an ideal literature would both remain continuously accessible and that any given item could be linked to any other item in the database according to any criteria.” ⤴️
  • “Nelson considers the absent link, the lacuna, to be as important as those already forged: Within bodies of writing, everywhere, there are linkages we tend not to see.” ⤴️
  • “the documents not present as well as those that are, and the grand cat’s cradle among them all.” ⤴️
  • “new methods of organizing material that could coexist simultaneously with extant systems.” ⤴️
  • “Xanadu would not only preserve existing connections between bodies of writing, it would allow for new ways of connecting the material according to the values of future readers.” ⤴️
  • “One limitation of the system Nelson imagined was that the core technologies would remain centralized.” ⤴️
  • “We experience the web not as a unified hierarchy of organized information, but as a collective pool of knowledge, which we can access, view, and reorganize in a variety of ways.” ⤴️

• “The Beast recognized no game boundaries; the players were always playing, so long as they were connected to one of their many everyday networks. [27] The basic approach of the ARG is to breach the ontological boundary between network play and lived reality, helping the players to suspend their sense of disbelief by immersing them in the game.” ⤴️

• “By allowing players to keep intellectual property rights to objects they create in Second Life, the game’s designers have explicitly acknowledged that Second Life is a collective endeavor, that its players are also designers [4].” ⤴️

• “McGonigal reports that some members of the Cloudmakers, a group of players who coalesced around The Beast and figured themselves “a collective intelligence unparalleled in entertainment history,” even banded together after 9/11 in an attempt to harness their skills, which had proved adept at solving an orchestrated mystery online, in solving the real crime of the terrorist attack on New York. The players felt so empowered by their experience of solving “The Beast” together that they felt they could together solve any puzzle laid in their path.” ⤴️

• “literary systems functioning within other systems” ⤴️

• “Collective narratives are collective to varying degrees, dependent upon the distribution of agency both to distributed authors and to aspects of the system itself.” ⤴️

• “those in which the contributors are not at all conscious that their activity is resulting in artistic production” ⤴️

• “Conscious participation: Contributors are fully conscious of explicit constraints, of the nature of the project, and of how their contribution to it might be utilized. Contributory participation: Contributors may not be aware of how their contribution fits into the overall architecture of the project, or even of the nature of the project itself, but they do take conscious steps to make their contribution available to the project. Unwitting participation: Texts utilized in the collective narrative are gathered by the text-machine itself, and contributors have no conscious involvement in the process of gathering the material.” ⤴️

  • that’s why i often take issue with nature-as-participant because it is surely always unwitting, we can’t get informed consent

• “they had no conception of how their contribution might be linked into the hypertext as a whole – they were contributory participants.” ⤴️

• “Delivered in this oracular fashion, the disembodied lips might emphasize the collectivity and anonymity of the oral tradition, which the project emulates. The fact that the videos themselves are not archived but available only as a live webcast similarly echoes the oral tradition. The texts are archived, but to experience the performance, the viewer must be “present” at a scheduled time.” ⤴️

• “collectively written constructive hypertext has become everyday practice on the web.” ⤴️

• “While Wikipedia is in fact susceptible to vandalism, and is in fact mostly written by amateurs, it turns out that a large enough group of amateurs, passionate about the topics they know and care about, tends to trump both inaccuracy and vandalism over time. Spam on Wikipedia is quickly removed, and articles that are vandalized are quickly repaired.” ⤴️

• “Wikipedia is one prominent example of a constructive hypertext built on open source software and user-contributed content, which every reader has the capability to modify. Tim O’Reilly has described systems like Wikipedia as “architectures of participation,” systems in which “a grassroots user base creates a self-regulating collaborative network”” ⤴️

• “So how does anarchy govern itself? One of the strengths of Wikipedia is that it has a clearly defined central mission, and that the principle functions that the Wikipedia community plays in fulfilling that mission are also clearly defined.” ⤴️

• “characterized by an extensive peer review process designed to make its articles of a quality comparable to professional encyclopedias.” ⤴️

• “Wikipedia offers the collective a great deal more responsibility than virtually any other historical reference project. By making the distribution of power clear, by establishing collective responsibility, and by empowering literally anyone to not only opine, but act in the formation of the knowledge base, Wikipedia has managed to avoid the bureaucratic bottlenecks that have plagued similar endeavors in the past.” ⤴️

• “While Nupedia shared the same idealistic central mission as Wikipedia, to build the best possible free encyclopedia on the internet, it failed to trust the collective intelligence of the network. The developers of Nupedia wanted all of the articles on the site to go through a rigorous peer review process.” ⤴️

• “the specificity of Wikipedia’s goal, “to create and provide a freely licensed and high quality encyclopedia to every single person on the planet in his or her own language,” [34] enables the formation of a kind of intentional community; the central mission moderates all conflicts and debates that occur on Wikipedia.” ⤴️

• “Open source methodologies posit everything as a draft in progress, open to revision. A centralized authority does not approve projects before they are launched, but rather decentralized authority improves them constantly.” ⤴️

• ““Wikipedia Sociology” [7] describes various forms of “factionalism” within the Wikipedians, including Deletionism vs. Inclusionism and Eventualism vs. Immediatism. Given the collective responsibility for organizing the world’s knowledge, the Wikipedians’ differing approaches to methodology have taken the shape of competing ideologies.” ⤴️

• “Wikis have anarchic power structures, and before Wikipedia, many feared that such a project would be prone to amateurism, hucksterism, and vandalism.” ⤴️

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Flickr and tagging

• “sorting them into clusters based on the other tags on the same photos. The result is more fined tuned differentiation of categories, based on a conceptually simple process. One compelling aspect of tagging and the clusters of similarly tagged photos that emerge across the Flickr network is that individual Flickr users aren’t consciously thinking about forging connections with others. The first purpose of tagging photographs for individuals is to organize and make more accessible their own collection of images. In doing so they however simultaneously enrich the Flickr database as a whole. Tim O’Reilly describes this characteristic as a distinctive feature of architectures of participation: This architectural insight may actually be more central to the success of open source than the more frequently cited appeal to volunteerism. The architecture of Linux, the Internet, and the World Wide Web are such that users pursuing their own “selfish” interests build collective value as an automatic byproduct. [29]” ⤴️
• “enable the sharing of more specific types of information and media such as photos, web bookmarks, and notes on academic papers.” ⤴️
• “Flickr has indeed developed architecture of participation based one part on the structured play of groups and another part on the emergent folksonomy of tagging.” ⤴️
• “to share art and knowledge, to contribute to and benefit from a specific collective endeavor.” ⤴️
• “Flickr, a web-based photo management and sharing application and community, is a demonstrative example of the result of combining a powerful database application, a user-defined tagging system, and community tools, with an interested, variously skilled, and active user base.” ⤴️
• “Flickr groups are oriented not only towards social activity and to sharing knowledge about specialized topics, but also towards collective art projects defined by specific constraints that range from simple to complex.” ⤴️
• “What may have seemed outlandish in the 1980s is merely an extrapolation of existing technologies and methodologies today.” ⤴️
• “In “Feral Hypertext: When Hypertext Literature Escapes Control” Jill Walker describes the tagging systems used by Flickr, CiteULike and Del.icio.us as feral hypertext: This doesn’t mean there are no structures or rules. Quite the contrary: these systems work because they have simple but flexible ground conditions that establish environments that make emergent organization instantly visible. [35] Walker argues that tagging systems allow for emergent connections.” ⤴️
• “a novel that is in effect many novels with interchangeable parts, written according to sets of specific constraints to ensure a degree of formal unity, and tagged with metadata that would make it possible to easily remix novels in thousands of structured configurations.” ⤴️
• “What we do today with our collective references and photographs we could soon do, together, in collective narrative. It is well within our reach.” ⤴️
• “upgraded their tagging system to include “clustering,” a hypertext system that organizes the search tag results by the” ⤴️
• “successful hypertext systems since, including the World Wide Web itself, have been based on extensibility, the ability to adapt” ⤴️
• “rature, the collaborative effort involved in creating, publishing and distributing works is more clearly evident, if only because there is effectively no electronic literature publishing industry. The roles of contributors such as designers, artists, and editors are typically more clearly acknowledged because without assistance, authors are compelled to do everything by themselves. There are few traditional publishers of electronic literature, so there is no apparatus in place to keep the labor of producing and distributing the work invisible. If, for the past few centuries, literary culture has centered on the cult of authorship, collectively written works of literature are not unknown in literary studies. Both the Judeo-Christian Bible and the works of Homer, for instance, could be considered as collective texts. The writing of the Old and New Testaments took place over about two thousand years and involved at least forty different writers, some of whom were adapting elements of an oral tradition. The proc” ⤴️