I’ve been thinking about collaboration. Writing, the actual
putting of words on the page, is for the most part a solitary activity—and one
reason I’ve welcomed the chance to be involved with KSR is the opportunity it
offers me for solitude. I like the space being by myself creates, I like wandering
and looking and thinking without having to talk as I go. My reading and writing
can proceed at their own pace when I have time and space to feel my way along
an idea or a sentence.
But behind this solitary thinking and writing are other
people. My writing draws on what I’ve read, questions I’ve asked that someone
has responded to, ideas I’ve heard expressed, and once I have a finished
version of something I look around for people to read it. I want, first,
readers whom I trust to consider the writing rather than my ego: is it actually
finished? what are its weaknesses? where does it not make itself clear? At this
stage the work of writing becomes, ideally, collaborative and through the
collaboration the work is clarified and strengthened. In my experience the best
editing is a collaborative process during which the poem or essay grows closer
and closer to saying fully what it wants to say.
I’ve been learning something about how science is practiced
and how scientists are educated. Earlier this year I had lunch with zoologist
Steve Tobe and some of the students from his lab.* One of them was a young
woman from a very small town in mainland China. When someone asked her if she
felt isolated or lonely being in a large western city and having to live in
another language, she replied no, because she had her companions, the other
students in the lab. They constitute a community who not only work together but
also play together and help each other out. She added that she thought it was
often difficult for the Chinese students who came here to study history or politics,
because they didn’t make close connections with their fellow students in the
same way, through collaborating on an on-going project.
My own training was in the humanities at a time when the
first person was never used in a
university essay, but that had more to do with ideas of objectivity and final
truths than any humility. When I look back it seems the ego was central
and competition the rule. You were supposed to get your ideas expressed well
and claim ownership of them before someone else beat you to it. I don’t know if education in science then
proceeded with the same sense of collaboration it seems to have now—or for that
matter if my sense that collaboration is intrinsic to the practice of science
is accurate. I look forward to discussing this with people involved at KSR and
I’ll be exploring ideas and forms of collaboration from time to time in this
blog.
*If you're curious about Prof. Tobe (his research subjects are cockroaches and he looks like Einstein) here are some links:
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