Distributive Writing

Distributive writing is the collective authorship of texts.

This further requires both a definition of collective and texts, where collective means a connected group of individuals and texts are inscribed symbols chained together to achieve a larger meaning than isolated symbols. This places emphasis on texts being represented as writings. This could be written words, iconic symbology (e.g., graffiti), computer programming languages (C/C++, Java, Perl, etc.), meta-level mark-up (HTML, XML, SVG, PostScript), and their derivative works. Also, not to be excluded are all the above in various languages. Further, to define texts, we must also have an interpreter for the texts. For computer programming languages, we have a compiler, for writings we have written words interpreted by our mental faculties, and for meta-level mark-up there are web browsers, printers to interpret postscript, and various software applications which turn textual representations into another format. (Patrick Deegan and Jon Phillips, 2004)