I really enjoyed Rettburg's article for the way it describes all the different facets of collective authorship. I guess I had been thinking of collective narratives mostly in terms of the final product/project, but Rettburg's description of his collaborative process of writing The Unknown sounded much more focused on the actual writing process as a kind of performance. Ranging from "in person get-togethers taking turns at the keyboard" to "collective expeditions" and "sessions with friends," much of the process was live collaboration as opposed to virtual. In comparison, our wiki project, which is also an online hypertext, is not really based on any live collaboration... it's mostly (or will be) a result of virtual "play, negotiation, confrontation, and compromise."

It makes more sense to me that a collective narrative would focus on the live "performance" aspect if part of the project necessitates drawing material from the physical world, as did Invisible Seattle. Maybe the reason I find it intriguing that the principle authors of The Unknown focus so much on performance, then, is that I think their project was completely do-able from a virtual setting (much like our wiki).

So if there seems to be these two categories of collective narrative:

-collaborative narratives that rely on physically gathering information from the real world (as in Invisible Seattle)

-collaborative narratives could be constructed mostly in a virtual setting (like our wiki or PenguinWiki), as they are based on written contributions online

maybe the difference is that the first category involves much more of what Rettburg calls "unwitting participation" by random people?

do you guys think live collaboration would be an improvement to, or not really change, our wiki?