Principles for Exploring Virtual Collaborative Writing

Abstract

This chapter defines collaboration in some of its many variations and settings, and then it locates collaboration in the virtual world of contemporary writers connected through digital technology. In this way, it offers a snapshot of the kinds of collaboration about which this book’s writers write in Sections 2 – 7, while it also uses that collaboration in its own development. In other words, the understandings reflected in this chapter are the product of intense collaboration among this book’s writers, who have brought to it their own expertise in this subject matter. This chapter addresses (1) the literature of collaboration and collaborative writing in general, (2) the move from traditional collaborative writing efforts into that of virtual collaborative writing, and (3) six principles inherent to virtual collaborative writing. Taken together, they help us to develop the definitions on which we have based this book’s approaches to virtual collaborative writing.