This blog and paper are still alive! Please respond

Hi Everyone

My apologies for letting this blog and project go to the bottom of my ‘to do’ pile. The deadline for this blog->chapter writing project passed by a long time ago. The editors are still keen for us to produce a chapter, and we have a new final deadline of mid-January 2012! If you still want to be involved.

I don’t think we have yet produced enough text, brought into the discussion enough cultural geographic research on food, or perhaps kept or developed the kind of focus we need for this collaborative project to work.

This project needs a shot of adrenalin (mainly from me, I think) and maybe some new authors in order for us to meet this new deadline. On reflection, the success of previous collaborative online-to-paper co-authorship has been based on:

• all authors having a small number of papers to read and bounce off (this was the purpose of the Crang and Wylie papers we started with, which I may circulate via email to those who didn’t read them);
• inviting people to co-author a paper who would normally be the people whose work was talked about in the paper (meaning that authors talk about their own and other people’s work, and that discussions develop);
• my role is both as a co-author (see above) and as a prompter/nudger (asking people to clarify, explain, link different arguments, draw in more literature to their arguments, and ask new authors whose work is mentioned to join the group);
• after the discussion is more or less complete, my role is then to lead the coding, cutting and pasting of bits of text and to produce a draft of the co-authored piece (in this case, a paper which is written in one authorial voice, even though in practice it may not be entirely singular…), and to circulate that piece for comment, editing, etc.. until a chapter is agreed;
• it’s not only me that has to do this, I think, but I have to take more of a lead. Other people can chip in and, as was the case in the ‘Geographies of food: afters’ paper/blog, this process can also be the subject of discussion and agreement on the blog.

So, I would like to know 3 things from those who have contributed so far:

1. are you willing/able to devote some time to these conversations within the next 6 weeks, and to be nudged by me now and again (I realise that for some this kind of writing can be very difficult, and for others relatively easy – please let me know if there’s anything I can do to make this more like a discussion of what we do, and less like a full-blown piece of paper writing)?
2. if you haven’t read the Crang and Wylie pieces, would you be able to do so ASAP (they are short and I can email them to you)?
3. can you suggest other authors to invite who can talk about their work here (suggestions have been made, and I was also thinking of looking through the 2011 AAG handbook, as there were lots of food sessions with lots of potential authors to invite)?

Please answers these questions in a comment on this blog…

Thanks!

Ian