Babel Between Us 2020

Early in 2020 I was selected to be 1 of 18 writers participating in a groundbreaking collaborative fiction writing project. Nothing like it has ever been done before, and I was fortunate to be asked to be part of it. The project allows writers to be anonymous, if they wish, and so far, for the first iteration of writing, where I worked with 17 other writers from around the world, online, I stayed so. Now I think, before the second burst of writing happens, I’m going to start sharing the process more. Here is far more information on why BBU is so ambitous, not only for its intensive collaborative mode for also for its work with digital ethnography. https://www.babelbetween.us/description

Babel Between Us is an exploration of collaborative literature through a cartographic visualization of a co-created fiction. A group of 18 writers collectively improvise a story on an online forum during an extensive amount of time. The resulting fiction is analyzed by a team of ethnographers and presented as an interactive web-based map. This map is then presented back to the group of writers throughout the process, so they can adapt their writing or collaboration style (or choose not to). The final map is also presented as an interactive artwork in itself which is open for anyone to explore.

Theoretical Exploration We want to explore new ways to create and present collaboratively written literature. The best way to present a collective creative process is not necessarily in traditional form, but the nature of the process itself may require entirely new media formats to make the content comprehensible. By presenting a co-created story as a map, we allow the spectators to explore the world the writers have collectively created. Because they themselves interact with the fiction and find their own ways through the maze, we break up the linear narrative we are otherwise accustomed to. Since the map of the connection between the various posts is the basis of the experience of the work, the written text becomes secondary to the actual story.

Collaborative Process - We let 18 invited writers write a co-created fiction for three six-week long iterations. Writing takes place on an online forum where each new posts and comment is considered a unique item. Each such post has a unique timestamp and sender. The writers have no other rules except to follow the principle of “yes, and.” This means that we ask the writers to build on each other’s ideas and not hamper or shoot down each other’s creative processes.

Digital Ethnography & SSNA To create the map, we use the latest technology in digital ethnography, called semantic social network analysis (SSNA). The process briefly states that a group of ethnographers analyze all the entries that the writers write on the forum, and gives each record one or more tags that can process all the content, from events to mood, tone, and more. Read more on SSNA in this paper.

Why? Collective writing easily becomes unmanageably sprawling because it is difficult for any single participant to embrace the totality of the fiction they co-create. Unlike improvisation theater, live role-playing and other co-created art forms, collective writing takes place as correspondence where many threads are going on at the same time, while the writers are in very different environments and state of mind. / The role of the ethnographers is then to show the writers an overview of their collectively created fiction. The interactive network graph allows them to see which themes they themselves have been most involved in and which they have not yet explored, and which writers they often interact with and which they not. They also see which themes often occur together and can explore the history they themselves write from angles they have not seen before, allowing them to consciously allow them to converge or branch.

Aim Our aim is to explore a new literary and artistic practice, based on the self-reinforcing feedback loop between a collaborative creative process on one hand, and new ethnographic frameworks and practices on the other. In this way, we explore the possibilities for how literature and ethnography can interact in new forms of expression, while at the same time testing the boundaries of both areas, as well as creating a new kind of art - perched somewhere in between a novel, experimental academia, and a LARP. 

A note on : Babel Between Us = Ethnography June 6, 2020

One of the biggest projects of my 2020 is Babel Between Us, a first of its kind collaborative fiction enterprise, where I write with 17 other writers around the world, creating and responding in a specially made online interface. www.stevenjfowler.com/babelbetweenus

Perhaps the most remarkable element of this ambitious undertaking is the team of ethnographers who analyse the writers texts between phases of writing. As Jakob Skote puts it  “The ethnography plays many roles within this project. One of them is to explore if the ethnography can be an aid to the collaborative process among the writers. In this sense the ethnographers become a part of their creative process, by providing a constant reflection of the collaboration. The texts are the only representations of the collaboration that we have access to. By treating these texts as a subject of ethnography in itself, the ethnography focuses solely on the results of the collaboration, and does not take into account outside influences and the writers’ individual personas. The texts are in this way treated as a representation of the writers’ collective consciousness, in its own right.”

It’s an immensely complex undertaking, but explained in great depth here https://bbu.world/t/ethnography-report-iteration-1/1005

When reflected upon, it’s a naturally a process rare to writing at all and I’m trying to somehow embed this knowledge into my future participation in the project.

Apr 14The history of the beeBabel Between Us

“The real history of the bee begins in the seventeenth century, with the discoveries of the great Dutch savant Swammerdam. It is well, however, to add this detail, but little known: before Swammerdam a Flemish naturalist named Clutius had arrived at certain important truths, such as the sole materni…

Apr 9An invitation to the Interview Fiction of Professor AudiardBabel Between Us

Professor Audiard was confused at why a writer from a scientific discipline would be fundamentally less insightful to literary matters than a literary practitioners. Aside from hours applied to the study of the subject, if anything, the ability to be rigorous, and perceive levels of understanding, s…

Apr 6The Blood BankBabel Between Us

We are told to climb the white steps into the building. We cannot have travelled far, passing through the side gate, behind our lodgings, out of the courtyard and then, it seems to me now, distracted by those we were silently sizing up and interrogating. Perhaps the are highly suited to their purpos…

Mar 30Nestor The CommunistBabel Between Us

Though the way in which Communist’s define ‘enough’ differs for those pursuing other kinds of ideology. Enough is a capitalist concept, or so she muttered, and then aimed to extend the conversation. For the sake of the cause. Because it had to be shown to the goons how far one had to go. To make Nes…

Mar 30Just the Usual Human Stuff, Death and ImpermanenceBabel Between Us

Jess is no longer readable. She won’t show her exhaustion. To where have our difficulties disappeared? Into her chest. It cannot be that so much that was filling time and space and conversations and touches between us before is now disappeared. So where has it gone? Her breath has been strong. She d…

Mar 30Everything that happened to me that spring happened to me privatelyBabel Between Us

We are waiting for winter. I am almost through the window and sat on the floor by the door. Tomorrow we’ll push all of the fobs and alarms and boxes of scissor and cellotape into another large box. And this box will be closed and put into storage. To wait for winter. We hope we won’t need it, nor a…

Mar 22A poem of sortsBabel Between Us

The post isn’t empty

Mar 21EpidemicBabel Between Us

STATE BODY "Just take it that everyone is a potential hazard, is the advice, and I’m spending 13 hours a day thinking about whether the vaccination will be mandatory. Does the immune system grow when challenged? Very impressive doctor on TV. Let’s hope her warnings are taken seriously by other cou…

Mar 15Acts of activityBabel Between Us

When Isabelle Eberhardt died a ritual death in November 1999, she was only forty-five. She had written forty novels, eighteen plays, and twenty volumes of short stories, and was nominated three times for the Nobel Prize. During her lifetime, she had seen almost all her major novels appear in English…

Mar 13The UnveilingBabel Between Us

But it isn’t an eye. Not as I have an eye. Before I discern why it is round the navy curtains halt and return closed. It’s a weird thing to happen. I’m trapped in by the crowd about me, embodying history, or as I can hear some hack journalist whispering into her phone so they don’t have to write tha…

Mar 13Just the Usual Human Stuff, Death and ImpermanenceBabel Between Us

I leave Dad and Yann and return to the only space in the house I think will soon be disturbed, the small box before the front door that doesn’t belong there. It is just a half metre square, no door but the front door, but I switch the lights off and stand still, in the dark. No one notices I am ther…

Mar 13The edge of ExistenceBabel Between Us

They are being washed, at some point. Remembering, or someone is doing it for them. Someone is offering to them a different kind of contact with other things that aren’t either of them. By wiping off the skin what has accumulated. Which should feel freeing, even emancipatory. But that too is laden w…

Mar 13A slow moverBabel Between Us

Quite hard. Firm even. Not rock or anything. It cannot see soft because it is not soft. how soft could this hardness see? It is a fast thinker, a slow mover, but its alright, we’ll all fold anyway. How slowly we grow old, leaving strains of me with you, like evidence. Like a tree that’s plastere…

Mar 11Nestor The CommunistBabel Between Us

Nestor shuffled, seated, surrounded by the boys in the car, watching them flame, glaring, staring in the distance, as though they drove as a unit. As though they drove the car by not speaking, and that the motor required their collective silence and seriousness to work. They moved through space, fou…

Mar 9Beteen Us BabeleBabel Between Us

Beteen Us Babelle It remains a psychological state of self-defeatedness to imagine one poor of talent if one isn’t selected for a undertaking one has applied to, as well as feeling unworthy and deflated and burdened within quick succession if one does indeed achieve one’s aim and becomes part of su…

Mar 9Beteen Us BabelleThe Public Gardens

It remains a psychological state of self-defeatedness to imagine one poor of talent if one isn’t selected for a undertaking one has applied to, as well as feeling unworthy and deflated and burdened within quick succession if one does indeed achieve one’s aim and becomes part of such an endeavour. It…

Mar 9Place of learningBabel Between Us

I did say like a dream, but I did study at the university, I was at study, once, and as such, being critically minded, within reason, I have to ask myself, whose dream? Structured like a dream all the same. Not my dream. But like a dream in the sense that it was only real through memory. I say throu…

Jan 12BBU application - response by WereBearThe Public Gardens

Unpromted contribution It isn’t easy to write an obituary. This is not only because you either knew the deceased too well or not well enough at all. But also because there is inevitably a word limit. In this case, it was less than 2000 characters. The first pain the writer felt, already a sensation …