Collaboration and feedback

In the humanities, collaboration is still relatively rare. (I have actually co-written an essay, but
would hardly consider myself an expert on the process; the opportunity came about not because my co-author and I had done any extended research together, but because my co-author was a much more senior academic who knew I had a pretty good background in the area and wanted some help with the heavy lifting of putting the article together.) The rules governing authorships (first author? second author? co-author? seventeenth author?) are opaque and arcane in my context, and so are the very processes by which two authors work so closely together as to share research and writing tasks.

I know there are those who question whether this should be the case; there was an article over at Inside Higher Ed recently about humanities labs. Whether or not such labs will ever catch on, however, the closest thing to collaboration in the humanities is less about actual research product, and more about workshopping material. I was lucky enough to attend a grad program that sponsored a range of brown-bag series, two of which were in fields relevant to my research. (There was also an excellent lecture series in my primary field, which helped model scholarly discussion, although it was much more formal than a workshop.) Beyond this, a kind and concerned faculty member in one of my cognate fields ran a dissertation workshop (entirely out of the goodness of his heart, because he got no particular support for it, and now I can appreciate even more how much work this would have entailed for no material reward). In all of these venues, authors circulated materials beforehand, and the group assembled at the appointed hour to discuss them in detail - not just the content (the arguments and whether they held water), but how those arguments were presented, and whether they might be better presented, where the papers needed to be expanded, what they needed to throw out, and so on. Especially valuable was the fact that except for the dissertation group, authors came from both grad students and faculty, and not just local faculty, but visiting faculty, often quite eminent ones in their fields.

The workshop format wasn't a panacea. The biggest problem was finding the time to read the material beforehand, so that any kind of a productive discussion could take place. (Yes, this sounds eerily like something my students would say about their course assignments...) Sometimes the author was reduced to talking a lot, summarizing what they'd already said in the paper, and listening to comments of limited relevance, since they were what the audience could pull out of their collective asses based on the oral presentation. Other times, the audience and author really were mismatched, and people didn't know enough about the topic to generate useful feedback. When they worked, however, discussion was lively, insightful, and provided the grateful author with important insights to bring back to their revisions.

In any case, this kind of workshopping is really the closest thing I can imagine to the collaboration that occurs in the sciences and social sciences (not, however, that I know anything about the latter, except perhaps enough to realize that my analogy is terrible). What I envy about that collaboration is the idea that there is someone else out there who is committed to reading your material and responding to it in detail. In collaborations, this is of course because your co-author(s) have an investment in making sure that the paper looks good. In the humanities, I can only really think of a twofold payback: first, the satisfaction of helping someone and learning something in the process (aw! altruism!), and second, knowing that if you help someone out with feedback, they'll help you out the same way in future.

In any case, this long rumination is really just the prelude to a question for the internets: how do you get feedback on your scholarly work, and when and how do you find it most constructive? Do you have collaborators, and if so, who does what, and how do you critique each others' work? Do you have readers who aren't collaborators? Are they in your subfield/field/discipline/other? Are you an early-feedback-and-revise-er, or a this-is-nearly-done-and-I-just-want-help-polishing-it kind of person? What kinds of comments do you find helpful?

I started thinking about this when I was planning to give LDH the Article That Won't Get Done to read over for me. LDH also has a doctorate in history (although his is in a different field from mine, and he's working in a different discipline altogether now). We've read each others' work for years (I'm pretty sure I read every word in his dissertation at least once), though I've tended to read his stuff more than he reads mine, for various reasons - one of which is our different styles/interests in getting feedback. As I've mentioned before, I tend to spew on the page and then mess with what comes out. Therefore, if I ask someone to read my work at a relatively early stage, there's no point in their investing major time in fixing specific language, because I'm probably going to change most of it anyway. What I'm usually looking for at that point is reactions to the main ideas, maybe some ideas about structure, or even just some confirmation that the points I think I'm making are actually relevant to someone other than me. LDH, as I've also explained before, revises as he goes along, and has a hard time leaving a sentence behind him until he believes it's perfect. He tends to sit down and write something from the beginning to the end, and then he's done. Therefore, he never produces the kind of writing that I produce.

Over the years, I've actually trained him pretty well to respond what I'm doing rather than what he would have done, and he's gotten very good at responding to the big ideas rather than the minute details. But he can't help focusing on the minute details, and he loves to mess with my language. In addition to different writing processes, we have very. different. writing styles, and I tend to reject most of his stylistic suggestions (though I sometimes go back and adapt a number of them). For instance, he is a devotee of the em dash, and while I know that I sprinkle them lavishly throughout my blog entries, I tend to dislike them in scholarly writing as overly dramatic and emotional. Whenever he reads my writing, he puts them in, and I take them out. Neither of us gets offended - it's just how it works.

Or, another example - at Rural Utopia, I tried to start a writing group among junior faculty. It fell apart because it was impossible to coordinate our writing schedules, but we did meet once to discuss a grant application I was submittting. One of the two colleagues I met with had gone to a grad program in great sympathy with my own, and she gave me lots of feedback that I found wonderful and helpful. The other colleague gave me plenty of comments, but they felt a tiny bit more like criticisms than like directions to take in making the material better. (She wasn't being cruel, I hasten to add - she just had a different style of feedback than I and my other colleague did.)

As I write this, a teaching analogy comes to mind: the best kind of feedback is like the best kind of discussion questions - they encourage people to come up with more to say. The worst kind of feedback, to me, is like bad discussion questions - they have a right or wrong answer, and that's it - end of discussion. (Okay, it's true that there are right/wrong things to be addressed in writing - if I have grammar errors, I don't want a philosophical discourse about the possible significance of said errors, I just want them fixed. But I hope you get what I mean.)