I’ve been thinking about how to design online textbooks that are intrinsically collaborative, can be ‘authoratative’ where necessary and don’t revolve around a central, linear narrative. It’s a concept, this lack of linear narrative, that is coming up more and more. People are talking about having websites, groups, communities… all kinds of things that are not tied by spokes to a central core but can move around in relation to each other. I want to talk a bit about this, clear an idea out of my head and throw in out there for you folks to help me work on.
rhizomatic - Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari used the term “rhizome” to describe theory and research that allows for multiple, non-hierarchical entry and exit points in data representation and interpretation.
I’ve spent much of my ‘free time’ lately looking at models of collaboration. Stephen put up a very cool set of distinctions between linear models of collaboration from a whiteboard he’s drawn on when he was in Australia/New Zealand. I was also looking at a new posting from Nancy White detailing the 8 competencies of online interaction (in conjunction with some fantastic photos… she has such a nice feeling for the transcendent image). The word that popped into my head was ‘rhizomatic’. That’s what’s been bugging me about the profusion of dots and lines connecting with each other to describe collaborative communities. They all look rhizomatic. First a bit of an introducation to rhizomatic structures and what both the metaphor/real have to tell us about how we all can/do communicate, and then back to texts. warning – i am not an expert at this… just a lowly philosopher wannabe.
I was looking for a nice webpage to give a clear defintion of rhizomes the other day and came across this little beauty. It was (i hope) written a while ago, but it does a nice job of detailing the distinction between arbolic and rhizomatic structures. Deleuze and Guitarri’s A Thousand Plateaus is not a book for… casual reading… but the ‘translation’ of it given here is sufficient to detail its connection to the way we talk about collaboration.
Deleuze and Guattari’s Rhizomatic Versus Arbolic
| Rhizomatic | Arbolic |
| Non-linear | Linear |
| Anarchic | Hierarchic |
| Nomadic | Sedentary |
| Smooth | Striated |
| Deterritorialized | Territorialized |
| Multiplicitous | Unitary and binary |
| Minor science | Major science |
| Heterogeneity | Homogeneity |
This is one of the ‘the polluted inheritances of the enlightenment.’ We are committed, partially due to the quest for Truth and partially because our technologies (sequential pages in books etc…), to thinking our way through building things in linear ways to answer specific problems. When things build up on their own however – see the way that a blogging community tends to do this (another fantastic set of slides from nancy) – we see a more rhizomatic structure poking through the rigid structures of linear, enlightenment style thought.So, now, how do we build a text this way. The term text, of course, is problematic. It too has a polluted inheritance that suggests something with a certain smell and structure (mmm… old book smell). This is, for those of you who don’t like neologisms, why it is so necessary to control and often change the language we use in order to get new ideas out of the garage. For the next few months I’m going to be experimenting with ways of building rhizomatic texts… I’m looking for folks to come on this journey with me, as its a little tough to create a rhizomatic community by myself.
tech note: I had orginally hoped that wikis would be the answer to this, but am now not so sure. I’m very open to suggestion on the platform for this exploration. I’m currently leaning towards elggish drupalness… but am not permanently sold on that either.
dave
I run this site... among other things.
Just found this http://t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm here http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/mtarchive/003808.html
[...] Now, lets go back to the iniatial discussion on rhizomatic communities. The definition we pulled from wikipedia said rhizomes described “theory and research that allows for multiple, non-hierarchical entry and exit points in data representation and interpretation.” In a internet context, the varied directions, backgrounds and perspectives that people bring to a community require those non-hierarchical entry and exit points that can be decided upon and acted upon by the user at their own whim. There are people who have ‘taken the course’ on webcastacademy that we have never, and will never meet. There are others who’ve done it for baby shows, some for politics and many for education. They are all welcome and all can participate to the extent and in the way that they need to. The end result is, that there is a growing entity that adapts to the new technology without our control. It follows trends before they can be observed, codified and integrated in to a traditional educational model. [...]
Interest in collaborative communities…check out http://www.elsewherelsewhere.org for aesthetically oriented collaboration.
[...] I think I have stumbled across a parallel that is worthy of note between the idea of rhizomatics and the Discovery 1 school. The idea of rhizomatics is briefly mentioned in a seminar I blogged about, and detailed more in some of Dave Cormier’s blog entries, starting with this introduction. The Discovery 1 school is a local experimental primary school I blogged about. [...]
A more than cursory glance at the project would reveal that this project is about digital identities and is addressing the issue of the fractured nature of the self when our online identities become distributed across multiple sites and services.
Rhizome is a Deleuzian concept that has been used and taken by many active in the field of art, science and philosophy. It is used in the project as a cipher for understandings of digital identity as:
- decentralised
- unpredictable
- connected
- branching in many directions
- having multiple entry points
- with no single true view – only partial perspectives
- and constituted as a multiplicity of dimensions where we lose the illusion of the objective all seeing eye/I
From this we are using the metaphor of cartography, the map, where we have no privileged entry point and is always open to change.
The references we use for this conceptual entry point to understanding digital identity are at the moment:
Deleuze & Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
Sermijn, Devlieger and Loots (2008). The Narrative Construction of the Self: Selfhood as a Rhizomatic Story. Qualitative Inquiry, (14)4:632–650.
http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/courses/ed253a/kellner/deleuze.html
Twitter Comment
+@dajbelshaw Dave Cormier’s great on rhizomotous learning http://bit.ly/72UIaj & [link to post] for example.
– Posted using Chat Catcher
[...] The dots represent people. The lines connecting the dots represent relationships between each person. Note that this network of learning/influence doesn’t resemble an org chart relationship at all? Instead, it bears very strong parallels to rhizomatic learning, as described by Mary Ann Reilly and Dave Cormier. [...]