Collaboration by Difference, Yet Again
Cat in the Stack
I happened to see Quantum of Solace last night and, at the dinner afterwards, with two friends and two teenage boys, we began asking lots of questions about filmic continuity, geography, and politics. This morning, I went to Wikipedia for some answers and they were all there, in this weighty entry on the latest Bond movie. That exploration led to another, and another, and another, and I began thinking more about collaboration by difference, the HASTAC model and the one, I suppose, that I'm responsible for pushing and exploring and, of course, writing about, not only in this blog but in papers and in some books that will be coming out soon. Here are this chilly Sunday morning's thoughts on one of my favorite subjects.
First, I do not think collaboration is intrinsically and in all situations the ideal method. Sometimes going inside oneself and being solitary is the best way to arrive at a major, conceptual breakthrough. (I've blogged a lot about that this year as well, in my "Thinking on Leave" postings about the necessity, after a few decades of being so engaged with the academic world, of needing this year to read, to think, to walk, to disengage in order to reengage, what Toffler calls learning, unlearning, and relearning.) Collaboration is useful when it works but is not the only method that works.
Second, I agree with many of the conclusions in the splendid studies by Jonathon Cummings that collaboration sometimes accentuates commonalities. And that is not always a good thing. That is, if there are inherent, shared assumptions, collaboration can reinforce rather than contest those assumptions. He works with distributed, multiuniversity, multidisciplinary science teams that do research together and sometimes their "weak ties" lead to work that takes longer and, in some situations, is narrower in its final, net ambitions than it might otherwise have been. I love his research and follow it avidly and I sometimes read his conclusions a little differently than he does (that's a funny sentence, no?). I think one reason for the inefficiencies of collaboration is rooted in the unarticulated form of those collaborations. In certain kinds of collaborative work, everyone compromises at the edges. I'm not even sure if those entering the collaboration are aware of constant self-adjustments they are making in the course of a collaboration (Dan Gilbert's work and also Dan Ariely's would suggest they aren't aware of it at all). During my years as an administrator, I saw this a lot. Sometimes you aimed very high but, given budget, personnel, rules, timelines, and circumstances, you ended up with something more circumscribed, less lofty, but workable and, in the end, actually working. The difference between theory and practice is often a matter of smoothing out edges, even edges that sometimes would have made the project more interesting but pose insurmountable obstacles to its successful implementation. As someone once said, you can't always get what you want but, if you try, sometimes, you find you can get what you need. (Who said that again? Emerson?)
Third, in collaboration by difference, you start with people who do not share assumptions, who do not share backgrounds, who do not share institutions, who do not share ideas, and who may not even share the same goals. And you see what happens. No game plan. We did this when we came up with the idea for the HASTAC Scholars. It's been fascinating to see the range of topics, the level of engagement, who contributes and who does not, who prefers the quick jab, who the long flow. That mix is what makes the Program interesting and vital. I hope the HASTAC Scholars start to use one another as resources . . . you often, for example, can't have a panel with all participants from your own university or just on your own pet topic, but HASTAC Scholars allow for a some great topical opportunities across institutions, with different disciplinary approaches. We'll see what comes of that.
Fourth, back to James Bond. So Sandy and Nathaniel were wondering out loud with Priscilla, Joe, and me about deserts in Bolivia, filmic continuity, who Vesper was and what she did or didn't do in the last Bond film, whether the movie was filmed on backlots or locations and what locations, and what Giancarlo Giannini had been doing since those Wertmuller movies of the 1970s. I went to Wikipedia this morning and spent the next half hour lost, far, far from the Quantum of Solace, clicking from link to link to link out into the information stratosphere. (Peter Lamont designed the sets, which were my favorite part of the movie; I was shocked to read he was born in 1929, sixty years worth of work as a film set designer. My other favorite part of the movie was James Bond's knifeblade-sharp Tom Ford suits and then the American CIA-agent's schlompy cotton shirts and dowdy ties worn on a slouchy posture that must have been fun for the costume designer Lindy Hemming and the actor. I was also interested to find that the plane battle sequences were filmed in thirty-second segments for safety reasons. But I digress . . .)
Here's the point: I rarely go to movies. But when I go, I find I am interested in just about everything, from the sets and the FX and the CGI to the acting methods, the production, the location, the politics, the colors, the costumes, the design. As with most of us, I have many areas of interest that, analogous to weak ties, might be called "weak interests," matters of curiosity but not expertise. The form of collaboration by difference that is Wikipedia is particularly satisfying because people who have expertise are the ones mainly responsibile for all of those entries that cater to my "weak interests." That is the brilliance of the volunteerism or what we call the participatory learning aspect of collaboration by difference. That is, if I am passionate about something, if I am an expert in it, I want to share that expertise and there are only so many dinner parties one can ruin (ah, this is getting personal) by talking about dopamine latency and new models of associative learning. (It's a conversation stopper, believe me.) But on Wikipedia, one can write to one's heart's content as long as you meet the community rules of Wikipedia. Anyone can then read your entry and they can choose when to stop reading about your obsession. They are not bound by the temporalities of the dinner table. They can dip in or dip out, they can follow links into the stratosphere.
This form of contribution and participation is not simply the "wisdom of crowds." It is the contribution of one's singular expertise to a community that can challenge, emend, review, or augment that expertise. You do not have to be bound by the "workability" factor that governs so much collaboration by research teams or by administrative taskforces--or the polite dinner party guest. Because others who are going to profit by the entry have the volition to enter and to exit, your contribution can be proportionate to your interests not theirs. You do not need to calibrate your contribution to a presumed, rather homogenized or statistically median interest of an implied audience the way you would for an article or book manuscript.
That is a key aspect of collaboration by difference. I may find something I never expected to find out because my expectations of an outcome are not governing your participation toward that outcome.
That is a new model of collaboration. In a subsequent posting, I will discuss the ways that online affordances promote this particular variation on the collaborative method in ways that other kinds of affordances, adjacencies, and intersections do not. We are just beginning, I believe, to parse the newness of new media and, to my mind, the most interesting aspects are the human, social, organizational possibilities that most of us are only now beginning to fathom together. Between a globally interconnected financial crisis of epic proportions and the success of the Internet-enabled-community-organizer-Chicago-Aldermanic-Web 2.0 model of the Obama presidental campaign, we are getting a crash course these days in how collaboration by difference works.
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Special thanks to Flickr community member Gin Girl Jen for this delightful collaborative image. I like the image (all her images are great---click on this one for full documentation and her photostream) and I like the concept, I jump, you jump, we all jump.
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That’s a great post, Cathy! What’s interesting, I think, is that human thinking might be inherently collaborative. After all, almost any human invention has gone through a countless number of adaptations, each built upon or created counter to technology preceding it. Take, for instance, drawing utensils and their evolution from a piece of charcoal to airbrushes and pressure-sensitive tablets. How many thousands of people were directly or indirectly involved in forwarding the conception our present day art tools?
And an artist who works alone is certainly not a sole creator of his or her work. Whether consciously or unconsciously, even the most recluse of artists, engage in at least two forms of collaboration. Clearly, the historical and societal forces, which influence what an artist creates, can be seen as setting up a kind of collaboration between the creator and a host of other human beings whose discoveries and ideas in some way shape his/her creation. But, there is this second form of collaboration that is rarely spoken of. As anybody who has tried to engage in creative activity knows, there is this inexplicable phenomenon which is sometimes referred to as inspiration, Muse, universal consciousness or God; this esoteric collaboration sometimes enables an artist to surpass his/her own comprehensions, skills and expectations and arrive at the unplanned and seemingly unattainable outcome. The creator himself is usually just as perplexed and awed by the fruits of this collaboration as is his audience. Eisenstein, who tried to crack the mysteries of his brilliant films, theorizing about them after their completion, was ultimately unable to postulate a set of formulas which would guarantee creative success. Frank Gehry approaches every project with insecurity, as does any artist, I think, because as soon as a one begins falling back on a tried approach, artmaking turns into manufacturing. This is why it is so difficult and so wonderful to be an artist. The unpredictability of the results is maddening and exhilarating and is similar, in a way, to how one engages with collective consciousness on the internet, where, as you put it one’s expectations of an outcome are not governing the participation of others toward that outcome.
I believe that building the web as the way to achieve instantaneous collective consciousness is the first step in creating a model that could help us better understand the fundamental philosophical questions. The redemptive potential of computing technologies is truly breathtaking, but so are probably its perils that might not yet be as apparent. Nursed on Marxism from my Soviet cradle and suspicious of it in my youth, I’m beginning to think that old Karl got it right when he talked about the new means of production (and their control) being the driving force behind the rise of new class systems. We might be on the verge of creating a whole new class system fueled by the web and other amazing forms of computer technologies.
I just love this comment. When I lived in Japan, it was so interesting that I had to teach my students what, in the West, we mean by "originality." They found it quite a quaintly Western (to say, slightly naive) concept, as if any of us can ever be free of our histories, our culture, those who have come before us.
I think what those of us who do not have the fortune to be artists learn from artists is the confidence to be insecure, the confidence to try and to fail and to try and to fail, with the awareness that imagination and creativity are never solely a product but also, crucially, a process. Your examples of Eisenstein and Gehry move me, that idea of approach every project with insecurity, never cracking the mystery.
I'm writing a most unusual book that is a new theory of mind for the Information Age, and, in the second part, it moves backwards through the stages in a human life from the late stage, to adolescence, and back to infancy to capture the wonder of synesthesia, especially in the arts, where all the senses and all the colors and all the forms swirl in the madness of beauty and do not yet have the labels that attempt, always unsuccessfully and sometimes pathetically, to capture them and put them in their place. That rambuctious uncategorical flow is, to me, what the arts are about and it is what even those of us who are not artists can reach for, and, sometime, in rare moments, attain.
Thank you for these beautiful and inspiring words, and, also, for your beautiful art.
Ha-ha-ha! And I have to challenge my American students’ ideas about originality by asking them to produce something they’ve never seen before. It is, of course, possible to conceive unconventional hybrids of previously observed and seemingly unrelated parts, but to imagine something out of this world, something entirely foreign that has never ever been seen by the human eye (with all of its techno appendages like microscopes and such)? Could it be that by “originality” or “imagination” we really mean one’s hyper-developed capacity to create fresh conglomerates from old components, to establish novel connections between distinct disciplines/categories/things?
It is so interesting what you’re working on! I find it fascinating that the dual way in which humanity has been coping with its predicaments—through the sciences on the one hand and through the arts and religion on the other—is begging for the synthesis of the two that might be further stimulated by the exponential growth of computing.
But let me share a personal memory with you. When Sophie was two, I remember walking with her on a very large lawn in front of our La Jolla townhouse. She was learning what things were called at that point and would point to something and ask for its name, which I would tell her, in Russian. So eventually she pointed to a little yellow flower and asked what it was called. I told her the word. But then she pointed to the same kind of flower right near it and asked what that other flower was called. I told her it was called the same thing and, at that moment, realized the absurdity of it and that, unwittingly, I was forcing my daughter’s young mind into the straight jacket of scientific categorization. I was amazed that thinking in categories was not an inborn predisposition of the human mind, but rather a learned system. I wondered then and wonder now what would have happened if I taught her a different word for every flower, every drop of water, every single object? After all, children absorb multiple languages quite easily and, even as adults, we posses computing powers that lay untapped for most of our lives. I agree with you that artmaking (and religion) are the vehicles on which adults flee back to that primal state of bewildering uniqueness and unity of everything. I’m very very interested in your new theory of mind. I have some crazy ideas on the subject.
First, thanks for this post - it sparked a number of thoughts for me, especially given that I'm living abroad for the first time. While I'm alienated from my home university (which in some ways is a good thing - I need this solitary time away), I am learning how to maintain a collaborative attitude with colleagues at home and at the same time participate fully in projects with scholars here. For this, new media - email, blogging, Skype, the Internet as a whole - has been key.
Apologies if this is a long post - I've been reading Max Weber & wanted to share some (hopefully) pertinent thoughts...sorry if it ends up ruining the dinner party, so to speak! I'll try to break it up a bit...
Human thinking as fundamentally collaborative
I agree with Anya that human thinking is fundamentally collaborative in some way - all of the most illustrious thinkers in history had select individuals with whom they shared and refined insights: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Kepler, Galileo, Newton... One might bring up artists or prophetic figures as prizing solitude at all costs, but I think Anya's description of inspiration or universal/historical consciousness aptly addresses the paradox of so-called "exclusively eremetic" artists/scientists/prophets. Stories like this one (& of course numerous historical examples) provide additional support for inspiration/revelation as a legitimate cooperative effort: the devoted must "make room for God" in order to "dwell directly in the unfiltered presence of the Lord." The ultimate goal for such a man is not "God's silence" (as the title of the article unfortunately states - someone doesn't get it!) but God's fullness.
Alienation of the academic
Professor Davidson, I wonder if your (well-founded) hesitance to endorse collaboration as ideal in every situation has its roots in Max Weber's conception of the scientist (specifically in his essay "Science as a Vocation"). He speaks of the academic as having an "inward calling for science," emphasizing the internal state of the scientist - the importance of having an inner devotion to one's specialty. According to Weber, estrangement from the outside world is not only ideal, but necessary for advancement of the field. He also speaks of a special kind of inspiration, not unlike the spur of the artist, a creativity which motivates and enables the scientist to see things differently from the rest of the world - hence, the scientific pioneer is often categorized as "mad". The same detachment, seriousness, and interest in infinitesimal details which make a scientist superbly suited to his/her field also serve to distance the academic from the rest of society, even from his/her students.
Why Weber would have appreciated wikipedia
"In science, each of us knows that what he has accomplished will be antiquated in ten, twenty, fifty years. That is the fate to which science is subjected; it is the very meaning of scientific work, to which it is devoted in a quite specific sense [...] Every scientific ‘fulfilment' raises new ‘questions'; it asks to be ‘surpassed' and outdated. Whoever wishes to serve science has to resign himself to this fact."Despite Weber's description of the scientist as necessarily aloof, he states that the very nature of science/academia both requires participation in community and renounces prospects of individual fame or fortune. Each scientific advancement is simply a link in a universal chain of understanding:
Accordingly, no single person can take complete credit for a particular discovery, as he/she could not have made such a breakthrough without employing knowledge from past and/or contemporary scholars. Weber's comparison of scientists as Plato's philosopher-kings, revealing the truth to those in the cave, coupled with an image of science as a ceaseless "march of progress", depicts the profession as necessarily cooperative - a shared journey towards an unseen end.
He arrives at a depiction of the scientist as a man/woman removed from society proper, and steeped in a value system strikingly different than that of the free market-operating within a system inherently based upon cooperation, not competition.
Based on these ideas, I think Weber would have found wikipedia as a laudable development - a virtual space where specialists were free to operate a cooperative value system without concern for physical space (no need for special meetings), time, or some kinds of social prejudice. The wikipedia community functions in many ways as the scientific community functions for Weber - as a self-policing, non-partisan entity devoted to knowledge for knowledge's sake. While I don't think wikipedia replaces the scientific or academic community, it certainly provides specialists of all types a place to have their ideas put forward, tested, revised, and refined according to a shared set of principles. I think that a communal value system is perhaps the reason why this type of collaboration - as you call it, Professor Davidson, "collaboration by difference" - is able to work.
A few questions after all this text
What do you think the parameters of collaboration by difference are? Are there key aspects that enable it to work? And what (if anything) causes it to fail?
Sorry for the late reply - it's been busy here with seminars & deadlines!
I'm a graduate student in classics & medieval studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. However, I'm spending this academic year abroad at the University of Bristol (UK) - it's a great experience, although at times exhausting & overwhelming!
I'm on FB as a member of the HASTAC community, and my name there is Angela Zielinski Kinney.
Hi, Angela, Thanks for this great post. What a marvelous conversation my originally pretty light and even frivolous post has engendered!
I mentioned that collaboration isn't always the best way in all situations simply to signal that there are many forms of thinking. Personally, I don't believe any of us has innate ideas but, rather, categories and forms that are part of the complex process of learning, even prelingual learning. So on the deepest level, everything, in the end, is collaborative in the broadest sense.
So I like Weber's idea of the "inward calling"--whether of the scientist, the artist, the writer, the humanist. But I guess I would even say that, in the end, that inward calling doesn't stand alone but rather stands for some articulation of cultural norms that is part of the collaborative process that is nurture.
On the other hand, collaboration of a formal type, where people consciously contribute to something for some end, also is cultural and comes in many forms. For me a key aspect of collaboration by difference is that it seeks to highlight, rather than efface and smooth over, points of contrast or rather it relies on the differences to highlight problems, to spotlight areas where there is genuine disagreement, difference, methodological variety, additional content, or uneven expertise. We learn norms of collaboration (in the same way we learn norms of everything else) and sometimes an unspoken norm of collaboration is agreement. That is, if we do not arrive at consensus, we deem the collaboration a failure. But it is possible to salvage real insight from those moments and places where a collaboration does not produce consensus but, instead, genuine areas of irreconcilability. It sometimes takes a third party--and even a trained facilitator--to see productive content in disagreement. It's not part of our method or our training to be able to see that.
Yet often the model of concatenating knowledge that we find, for example, in a wiki reveals exactly those unexplained and unanticipated outcomes that come from participation by people of unequal background, power, or talent. Here's the clearest example: the child who immediately sees and points to that which all the adults are pretending doesn't exist. How not to silence that child's insights (and I know this example is a bit sentimental) is at the core of collaboration by difference.
Thanks for writing. Your comments really got me thinking!
For Innovators, There Is Brainpower in Numbers
“None of us is as smart as all of us.”
— Japanese proverb
DESPITE the enduring myth of the lone genius, innovation does not
take place in isolation. Truly productive invention requires the
meeting of minds from myriad perspectives, even if the innovators
themselves don’t always realize it.
Keith Sawyer, a researcher at Washington University
in St. Louis, calls this “group genius,” and in his book of the same
name he introduces a scientific method called interaction analysis to
the study of creativity. Through studying verbal cues, body language
and incremental adjustments during team innovation efforts, Mr. Sawyer
shows that what we experience as a flash of insight has actually
percolated in social interaction for quite some time.
“Innovation today isn’t a sudden break with the past, a brilliant
insight that one lone outsider pushes through to save the company,” he
says. “Just the opposite: innovation today is a continuous process of
small and constant change, and it’s built into the culture of
successful companies.”
It’s a perspective shared broadly in corporate America. Ed Catmull, president of Pixar Animation Studios and Disney
Animation Studios, describes what he calls “collective creativity” in a
cover article in the September issue of Harvard Business Review.
“Creativity involves a large number of people from different
disciplines working together to solve a great many problems,” he
writes. “Creativity must be present at every level of every artistic
and technical part of the organization.”
So, we all should brainstorm our way through the day, right? Wrong.
That classic tool introduced by Alex Osborn in 1948 has been proved in
a number of studies over the last 20 years to be far less effective
than generally believed. “He had it right in terms of group process,”
says Drew Boyd, a businessman based in Cincinnati who blogs and speaks
often about innovation. “But he had it wrong in terms of the method.”
Brainstorming, Mr. Boyd says, is the most overused and
underperforming tool in business today. Traditionally, brainstorming
revolves around the false premise that to get good ideas, a group must
generate a large list from which to cherry-pick. But researchers have
shown repeatedly that individuals working alone generate more ideas
than groups acting in concert. Among the problems are these: Throwing
in an idea for public consideration generates fear of failure, and
workers looking to advance their own interests often keep their best
ideas to themselves until a more opportune time.
Instead of identifying a problem and then seeking solutions, Mr.
Boyd suggests turning the process around: break down successful
products and processes into separate components, then study those parts
to find other potential uses. This process of “systematic inventive
thinking,” which evolved from the work of the Russian engineer and
scientist Genrich Altschuller, creates “pre-inventive” ideas that then
can be expanded into innovations.
Kapro Tools, working with an Israeli company called Systematic
Inventive Thinking, used the method to create a new type of bubble
level calibrated to help build gentle slopes to improve drainage.
Previously, construction workers approximated the slope they wanted by
placing a nail or other object under the edge of a standard level.
“Innovation is a team sport,” Mr. Boyd says. “There’s a dynamic that
happens between people that produces results I just don’t see with an
individual.”
Even Albert Einstein,
society’s most common mental picture of genius, needed group input to
hone his insights. According to “Einstein’s Mistakes” by Hans Ohanian,
the great physicist’s derivation of the famous equation E=mc2 contained
several errors; it wasn’t until 1911 that another scientist, Max von
Laue, developed a full and correct proof.
“The best innovations occur when you have networks of people with
diverse backgrounds gathering around a problem,” says Robert Fishkin,
president and chief executive of Reframeit Inc., a Web 2.0 company that
creates virtual space in a Web browser where users can share comments
and highlights on any site. “We need to get better at collaborating in
noncompetitive ways across company and organizational lines.”
THAT’S exactly what innovators at a dozen health care systems
throughout the country had in mind nearly four years ago when they
formed the Innovation Learning Network, says its director, Chris
McCarthy. The problem, he says, is that there are so few health care
innovators within each organization that introducing technologies and
processes can be painstakingly slow. “We thought if we could get all
these experienced folks together to push each other’s thinking
continually, we’d all be better off,” he says.
What started as a grant-financed, one-year trial is now a
member-financed permanent network, he says. The members bring in new
technologies and experiment with them in a faux clinical setting in San
Leandro, Calif.,. One of the first large-scale initiatives to arise
from the network is KP MedRite, an effort at Kaiser Permanente’s 32
hospitals to ensure that nurses are not interrupted while dispensing
medications. Other member health care systems have already begun to
introduce the program at their sites.
By using the group’s knowledge and experience, Kaiser Permanente
accomplished in less than a year what would have required roughly two
years to do without the network, Mr. McCarthy says. “It was a huge
jump-start for us,” he says. “The group effort allows us to move much
more quickly and become successful much faster.”
Janet Rae-Dupree writes about science and emerging technology in Silicon Valley.