Indira Neill Hoch

Contera introduces three women in her introduction, Ella Deloria, Jovita Gonzalez, and Zora Neale Hurston. It is not until chapter 6 that a fourth female author is introduced, and it is indeed her introduction that anchors the chapter. Margaret Eimer is introduced as Gonzalez’s friend and coauthor of Caballero and it is their collaboration ‘across borders’ that opens up Cotera’s analysis. However, Eimer’s earlier omission from the text complicates Contera’s own analysis of co-authorship and collaboration; someone always gets listed first. The fictional convention of the solitary fiction writer is rightly pointed out by Cotera, and explicit co-authorship works to undo the linear, cohesive fantasy of writing. Writing is a messy thing that often times ends up with a slick end product. The more digestible, the clearer the writing, the more successful that piece is considered. It is best to hide the ruptures of the writing process.

While Gonzalez and Eimer had to mail selections and corrections to the manuscript back and forth over a great length of time, current communication technologies allow for synchronic co-authorship across distances. Email’s asynchronic nature is similar to Gonzalez and Eimer’s mailings, but instant messaging applications and applications like google docs make synchronic co-authorship possible. I was absolutely giddy the first time I was able to write collaborative fiction in a google doc. Three of us were able to access the same document from Germany (myself), Brazil (Mae), and Kentucky (Becca). Rather than explaining what we wanted to include, we simply wrote it, rewrote it, remixed, and reorganized in front of each other’s eyes. As the fiction moved forward, I could track back, switching word order and adding texture, knowing that someone else was handling the plotting up ahead. We could be everywhere in the text all at once. Rather than the border crossing of collaborative work that Cotera is interested in, the document seemed borderless. In the process of writing we were incredibly open in our collaboration, not worrying too much about who wrote what, only that it sounded good.

It was in the process of reception that the nature of our border crossings and collaboration became apparent. The story was released to a LiveJournal community where the members were familiar with all three of us as individual authors. Becca posted the story under her account name, in a way, claiming first authorship, or at least association between her account and the story on a material level. However, what was most noticeable was the rush of readers trying to pick out who wrote what lines. Certain statements stood out as “Mae” because they reflected a syntax that a “native English speaker” would not produce or were “bluntly sexual.” (Hilarious, because the whole thing was an excuse for smut). “Becca’s” lines were “straight forward and direct,” and mine were “expressive, maybe too flowery, but pretty.” What we had seen as a collaborative text was parsed apart by an audience eager to turn it into a game. Where we had seen no borders, the game was predicated on stylistic differences between three authors whose previous texts could be used to cross-reference statements. The game was an intertextual one that required many documents to play. Rather than a border crossing collaboration, it was received as radically separate lines when remixed into the textual game.

My second major encounter with computer assisted co-authorship was academic. Assigned to produce a single report that reflected our qualitative fieldwork for class, five students who had worked with five qualitative methods compiled a single document. This was done asynchronically using DropBox. When it was time to work, we would individually download the file from DropBox, make our additions and edits, and then re-upload the file. We worked this way for several weeks. I included what I had gathered from a series of focussed interviews, others had done participant observation, observation, document analysis, and interviews. Using “track changes” on the Word document I would make slight suggestions about comma usage or ask for more clarification, but for the most part I stuck to my own section. One student had volunteered to do the substantive editing of the whole document, since she felt her contribution to the content and her time commitment during the research phase was less than some others in the group. In the end, the professor wanted the document posted to the class Wiki, which would allow him to see who had worked on what, as wikis track changes and allow for reversion to prior versions. We each copy/pasted our section from the word document into the wiki, then the student-editor did the formatting changes and we agreed to tell the instructor she had done significant editing work that was not reflected in the wiki’s changes. Another student then went into the wiki and made a number of small changes all over the document, adding their name as a string of edits, suggesting time and effort that had not been put into the ‘collaborative’ process beforehand. We were upset, but said nothing.

I offer these two examples as showing the politics of collaboration in new media environments. Contera describes the material nature of the Caballero manuscript as a double-sided history, one through Gonzalez and Eimer’s fiction, and one through gun store documentation. While she does not go into great detail regarding their decision making, there are hints to the politics of co-authorship, outside the disruption of the myth of the single author of history. Gonzalez and Eimer had a legal document saying they would split profits; Eimer wrote under a pseudonym; Gonzalez and not Eimer is referenced in Contera’s introduction. Even in collaborative texts about collaboration, the specter of individual effort remains and is difficult to dislodge. Why did I care so much that my classmate made a bunch of useless edits? Did I not trust my professor to see through it? Why did I even care what happened when I had done my own work? Why was I unable to let go and not care who did what, like I did when collaborating on fiction? The personal and collective seem always in tension when writing, maybe because we are taught the importance of the lone author.