I’m looking for poets and fiction writers willing to participate in a project to archive versions of texts in progress. An electronic document repository (known as a Concurrent Versions System, or CVS) will be used to track revisions and changes to original fiction and poetry contributed by participating writers who will work by checking their drafts in and out of the repository system. The goal is to provide access to a work at each and every state of its composition and conceptual evolution—thereby capturing the text as a living, dynamic object-in-the-making rather than a finished end-product. A reader will be able to watch the composition process unfold as though s/he were looking over the writer’s shoulder.
Participating writers must agree to:
The result will be a Web-accessible archive, with the full text of each and every version of a writer’s text available for reading and relations between the versions expressed by means of maps and visualizations.
To participate, please contact me at the email address in the blog banner. Please indicate your willingness to abide by the above constraints.
[Note: At this point I’m recruiting interested writers. I’m not sure when the project will actually get off the ground—hopefully this winter.]
Posted by mgk at October 2, 2005 03:51 PMMatt, were you Professor Charles Kinbote in another life? This is like putting John Shade into the Memex.
Posted by: Dennis G. Jerz at October 3, 2005 06:44 PM | Link to CommentI will happily write five versions of a poem for this. The trouble, I suspect, is that I will be tempted to write all five versions simultaneously.
Today while I was a creative writing for multimedia class in a computer lab, Dave, one of the computer lab guys, came in to show me how to use a remote desktop application that both allows me to show my screen to all my students and to view and interact with any student's desktop at any time. It was fascinating and well more than a little voyeuristic to pull up individual students' screens and watch as they wrote. I told them, of course, that I was testing the software and about what it did (I'm not Big Brother, I said, I'm Uncle Scott). Today we were writing scenes in a collaborative hyperfiction. Each student has control of a randomly generated character in an established scenario. The fascinating thing about the remote desktop ap was watching them write, pause, stop, erase, correct, revise, open up a web browser to research a trait or find a better detail, quickly take a break to shoot off dinner plans to their sig oth, etc. It occurred to me that I could do that for hours, even days.
The process of writing using the mac application SubEthaEdit is similar. You can have a group of people working on the same document (story, poem, application, whatever). Each person's writing can be marked with a different color, and all can write in the same space at the same time. While I've yet to be satisfied with a piece of writing I've done with friends in this environment, it is fascinating to write with peers in a real-time basis on the same screen.
I think drafts are fascinating, but they're sort of finished, in a way, each on their own. The pliable moment of new and uncertain, present in revision writing, the kind of mental stuttering we all do, is also very interesting to me.
Posted by: Scott Rettberg at October 5, 2005 12:10 AM | Link to CommentI very much like this idea and am happy to contribute to it. I do suggest you clarify your licensing in future versions of the CFP -- personally, I like Creative Creative commons because they make things simple. Is the site going to be fully public domain, or will it have a restricted license, where the public can read but not distribute, or where the public can distribute but must share alike, etc?
Also, are the writers donating the works to the project exclusively with full copyright, or does the project license the works while leaving the contibuters with control over future non-project related use of the contibutions? Will writers be working with one another (closed Wiki style) or will this be individual work with strict version control; CVS allows both?
This is the stuff that made me crazy at first on WriteHere -- especially with the contributer license.
Posted by: Matt Bowen at October 8, 2005 12:04 AM | Link to CommentExcellent questions Matt, thanks for raising them. As far as the license goes, Creative Commons will almost certainly be what I go with. As for your other questions:
"are the writers donating the works to the project exclusively with full copyright, or does the project license the works while leaving the contibuters with control over future non-project related use of the contibutions?"
The latter, for sure.
"Will writers be working with one another (closed Wiki style) or will this be individual work with strict version control; CVS allows both?"
Again, the latter. Collaborative writing is very interesting to me, but it's not what most interests me here. BTW, the "CVS" I set up will actually be Subversion.
All the cool kids use subversion :) Thanks for answering the questions, and I look forward to the start of the project.
Posted by: Matt Bowen at October 8, 2005 02:37 PM | Link to CommentI don't have anything to contribute, but I find this idea fascinating.
Posted by: Colm at October 10, 2005 01:12 AM | Link to Comment