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.