Issue 37 (December 2016)
Focus on: Social/cooperative writing
Coordinators: Daniel Cassany: daniel.cassany@upf.edu and Marià Marín: mmarintorne@gmail.com
Deadline for submissions: 30/06/2016
Author’s guidelines: https://bid.ub.edu/en/authors-guidelines
The rise of the use of the internet in all spheres of life has led to the emergence of new forms of cooperative reading and writing. We are now accustomed to reading Wikipedia entries and helping to correct the errors; asking or answering a question about language use on WordReference; sharing reviews of restaurants or hotels on TripAdvisor; accepting or rejecting comments made by readers of our latest blog post; using Google Drive to amend the research project we are carrying out with colleagues from different countries; searching a company’s online database, or playing alongside others in a war video game, among other things. These social reading and writing practices are gradually spreading to the point where, today, many “digital residents” host their texts in the cloud, begin their daily work reviewing the updates that have been made during the night or over the weekend and spend much of their time interacting online with collaborators (co-authors, reviewers, technicians, etc.) spread across the globe using countless screens, interfaces and programs. Before the advent of the internet, production of written works was also cooperative (with co-authors, editors, proofreaders, typesetters, designers, booksellers, etc.), but with fewer resources and possibilities.
In this special issue BiD is to explore some of the most important aspects of this social practice of cooperatively reading and writing on the internet. The aspects to be covered include:
1. Organization of online cooperation. Exploring how digital communities develop and structure themselves to cooperatively develop complex reading and writing tasks (multilingual, multimodal, specialist, etc.). We are interested in self-managed (fanfic, scanlation, bloggers, gamers, etc.) and official communities (institutional websites, corporate databases, etc.). How do people find each other on the internet? How do they distribute their roles? How do they collaborate and help each other? What problems arise? Etc. How do they manage to achieve significant milestones that an individual would find hard to achieve on their own.
2. Negotiation between co-authors, disciplines and cultures. How do interdisciplinary communities (including artists and scientists, scientists from different disciplines, etc.) from different places (Spanish speakers worldwide, and co-authors and audiences with varying levels of knowledge) interact on the internet and reach agreements to develop a unique product that they all feel represents them. Digital collapse and how to handle it.
3. Basic forms of web-based content production (prosumers): creation, aggregation and curation. Exploring the behaviour of internet users in these tasks in different environments (formal and informal, public and private, work and leisure, etc.).
4. Ethics. Rules and regulations linked to cooperating online, including the various forms of copyright, the concept of authorship, citation, copying and pasting, remix or plagiarism and its handling in different settings (education, arts, leisure, personal).
5. Different digital genres. Synchronous (chat and video games) and asynchronous (email, blog, wiki, web, etc.) forms of collaborative online writing.
6. Collective writing in different contexts: education (collaborative online teaching and learning), research (groups in different physical locations), art (cooperative digital literature), trade, etc. The similarities and differences between cooperative activity in various fields such as information and communication or creativity (art and science), and the generation of new forms of management, distribution, reception and creativity.
7. The transformations caused by online cooperation in the uses, habits, practices and texts of the community. How do language, norms, roles, identities, attitudes and values change due to cooperative experiences? How do the tasks of the different agents involved in the production of written texts (authors, proof-readers, graphic designers, editors, booksellers, librarians, readers, etc.) change?
