Cinnabar and Alabaster

tips & warnings
177. in other fields it's more common/accepted, but in the humanities "slower to capture a niche, despite such efforts to boost it as the national endowment for the humanities' relatively new grant-funding category for collaborative projects"  the endowment for the humanities thinks this is a good idea and we don't? and we don't even know about it?
181. in some fields, collaboration means less investment & more reward—for 30 pages of writing 2-6 people can get credit instead of just one. but this (esp in the humnaities) "may not nessessarily be the case"—"as coauthors have themselves observed, collaboration can change the dynamics of the writing process in ways that the uninitiated might not bargain for" which makes it in many ways harder (& definitely more time-consuming)
183-4. cautions include this list from fox & faver: (these are ways potential collaborators need to 'fit')

• more partners means more potential for disagreement
• "relative rank of partners (peers expend more time and energy than those in a hierarchal relationship, in which the senior partner often calls the shots)"
• gender can cause issues (& probably it's not the only thing that can)
• "complementarity in work habits and styles ('highly disparate tendencies may agitate the partnership and obstruct fulfillment of the project's tasks and goals');
• differences in energy level….
• 'primacy of work' for each partner (relative importance of work for each participant can be an impediment to the project's progress
• the problem of competing commitments….
• 'emotional tendencies and habits' (anxiety can be exacerbated in collaboration)
• 'achievement orientation' (a partner motivated by 'extrinsic' rewards may not be a good 'fit' for one motivated by 'intrinsic' rewards)"

; "one collaborator, who ultimately concedes the value of collaboration, nevertheless laments that it should be called 'collaborative fighting' rather than 'collaborative writing' (allen, atkinson, morgan, moore, and snow, 80-81)."
189. academic vetting processes are still "incompatible" with collaborative work/processes, but hopefully not for long: "perhaps the suspicion with which collaboration is sometimes viewed within the academy is only a temporary response" reflecting this discrepancy w/convention & thus "the problem…does not inhere in collaboration itself but in an outdated system for determining scholarly merit, a system that may indeed breed 'coauthor abuse'"; the final answer: "if you're in a discipline where collaboration is…something you can take or leave, then you're probably not in a profession where collaboration is even remotely valued"—but if it's valued the value might be negative & then it'll take a fight. bottom line is it has a lot of benefits, they aren't without cost, and at our current "transition point where two contradictory systems are in conflict" it's "certainly a risky venture" but one that can move writers past limitations working alone entails.