Experimenting with academic subjectivity: collective writing, peer production and collective intelligence

Abstract

Following involvement in several academic collectively written articles, the authors question traditional notions of the ‘lone’ individualist author model as the expected standard in the humanities as opposed to large research teams in physical sciences. They use Barthes and Foucault to question the function and the concept of the author and assumed notions of subjectivity. Recent collective writing as a form of peer production and publishing is an attempt to reinvent the concepts of authorship, the author subject and author subjectivity. These bring to the fore the processes of peer review, questions of ownership (for example, of what remains in a revision, whose contribution becomes revise..