The heavy metal umlaut
Now this entry is going to sound very esoteric to many of you. But please persevere and watch the linked movie.
This is about the future of cross-disciplinary collaborative research.
In the Metamedia Lab here at Stanford, we make much of the facility of our social software (like the Metamedia pages or Traumwerk) to track every change made to its pages. You can watch a bunch of us edit a collaboratively authored page on symmetrical archaeology, for example.
So what? – you might well ask.
Think of the teamwork that is archaeology.
A bunch of esoteric specialists in genetics, art history, taphonomy, trowelling, ceramics, soil science … and all the rest, working together to make sense of the remains of the past.
Wouldn’t it be instructive to watch how they might co-author a study of an archaeological site – comparing evidence and inference?
Here is how it might look – Jon Udell’s screen cast of a study of a page in Wikipedia on the heavy metal umlaut. (What a great philological topic!)
