Just before plunging back into my chapter this morning, I took my usual tour of the RSS feeds, and discovered DR’s post about collaborative authorship and its benefits. And just in the nick of time: the section of the chapter that I’m working on today is about the benefits of collaboration and other forms of socially-situated scholarly writing.

Most of the time, when scholars (outside rhet-comp, at least) discuss the benefits of collaboration, the first claim that gets made for it is “increased productivity,” a phrase that cannot help but raise specters for me, on the one hand, of some old forgotten joke about the new tractor and the Soviet five-year plan, and on the other, of Bill Readings’s assessment of the Fordist enterprise that higher education has become: “Produce what knowledge you like, only produce more of it, so that the system can speculate on knowledge differentials, can profit from the accumulation of intellectual capital” (164).

So I resist thinking about collaboration as a means of getting more work done. What I’m interested in is the ways that collaboration and other social modes of writing, and particularly those enabled by digital networks, might allow us to get better work done. (I say “other social modes of writing” because I want to include in the category that I’m thinking about not just literal co-authorship but also electronic extensions of phenomena like writing groups, in which the input of respondents can become as important to the process as the work one does in solitude.)

I’d really like to hear about your experiences: if you’ve worked in such a collaborative environment, how did it improve your work, either on the level of process or of product? What were the benefits of working, as DR describes, in a conversational framework? What, if any, were the drawbacks?

(And if there’s particular stuff in the literature about collaborative writing that you would feel a section of a chapter on digital authorship to be incomplete without referencing, I’d really love to hear about them…)

R. and I have been rewatching Deadwood, starting from the beginning, over the last few weeks, and I’ve found myself rather astonished by a few things:

1. How many small details and insinuations I’ve picked up that simply eluded me the first time around. I can’t count the number of times I’ve said “oh! That’s what that was about!”

2. How quickly my language has once again been infected by Deadwood-speak, not just in my choice of nouns and adjectives, but in syntax.

3. How absolutely brilliant the series was, not just in a use of language that comes as close as I can imagine to the Shakespearean, and not just in its stunning visual sense, but in its characterizations, its performances, and in the degree to which it made me care about a time and a place that I’d never before had the least interest in.

4. How insanely fucking furious I am made by the decisions of HBO/David Milch/whomever else involved, first to pull the plug on the fourth and final season, and now to eliminate what pathetic little shred of hope remained for any kind of even half-assed conclusion to the series.

I’m sitting in a cafe down the street, the one I mentioned some days back, the one with the streaming L.A. radio station.* The other thing they’ve got is free wifi, which is allowing me to sit here and goof around on some of my new iPhone apps (which I can’t do much of from the flat, as the WEP isn’t compatible and I haven’t been able to figure out how to change the router’s settings).

So, for no other reason than that I can, a blog post from my iPhone, courtesy of the new WordPress app.

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* Google Alert! I’ll pass on mentioning the station’s call sign this time, as the last mention got me an email from the station’s PR director within about four hours, asking exactly where I was. Panoptic much?

It was like someone flipped a lightswitch.

I’ve been listening to a number of podcasts from France Culture for the last couple of weeks, trying to tune my ear to a more rapid-fire, more quotidien mode of spoken French than I’ve been able to pick up from any of the French instruction audio I’ve listened to. Some of it’s been interesting, some of it’s been perplexing, some of it’s been an outright mystery, but all of it’s been work.

And then yesterday, I was listening to “le journal de 7h” (a five-to-thirteen minute podcast of the morning’s news headlines), and about three minutes in, I suddenly realized I’d heard it all. Heard, as in understood without actively listening, without paying attention, without trying to — or needing to — parse the sentences. Just heard.

As soon as I realized what had happened, I got a bit self-conscious about it, and the transparency of the language disappeared — but relaxing again, I was able to get it back, or at least glimpses of it. I spent much of the rest of the afternoon downloading and listening to other broadcasts, to see if the feeling was replicable, or if it was just a fluke, produced by the fact that I understood the basic facts of all of the stories presented. (No small feat: the conventions of French journalism are a good bit different from those in the U.S., not least around the amount of background info provided; in a story about the Bastille Day ceremonies, for instance, that mentions the détente between Sarkozy and the army stemming from the Carcassonne affair, you can’t necessarily expect to be told what exactly happened in Carcassonne. It’s assumed you’ve been keeping up, so jumping in mid-stream can be hard.)

It turns out that the feeling was replicable. And even live: I turned on the radio and caught an absolutely amazing Barthesian analysis of the bagless vacuum cleaner, followed by a remarkable interview with Alain Robbe-Grillet.

It was the damnedest thing: one day, I could comprehend fine, but only with effort; the next day, the effort was gone. Like flipping a switch, and now the lights are on.

That sensation will probably come and go — my struggles with this language are far from over — but I wanted to record this moment for myself, so that I can remember that the possibility of fluency is really out there.

One wonders whether the final outcome (please god) of this debacle will get anything like the coverage (so to speak) that its origin did: the Third Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals has overturned the fine of $550,000 levied by the FCC against CBS after Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction during the 2004 Super Bowl.

There are multiple mitigations of this judgment: CBS, of course, already paid the fine, and apologized profusely. And goodness knows that the amount they’ve paid their lawyers to handle this over the last three and a half years way outstrips the fine itself.

But here’s to the Third Circuit, for pointing out the obvious: that the FCC had “arbitrarily and capriciously departed from its prior policy” of not punishing accidental, unplanned, brief, and otherwise stupidly trivial violations of “standards.”

And let this be only the first of the insanely stupid things that have happened in the U.S. since January 2001 to be undone.

WordPress 2.6, which was released just a few days ago, contains expanded support for versioning of blog posts, allowing an author to see all of the revisions made to a particular post, as well as to compare various versions and to revert to some previous historical state.

This is a fabulous authoring tool, but it’s all resident in the backend: only the author has access to this versioning information. And for most purposes, that’s probably sufficient. But I could imagine a number of uses — in electronic scholarly publishing, for instance — when one might want the readers of a text to have access to a text’s history. Given that the history is already available, I imagine that it’s just a matter of a plugin that accesses the versioning data, organizing and presenting it on the frontend.

If somebody knows of such a plugin already in existence, I’d really like to hear about it. If not, I hope some enterprising developer starts thinking about one…