A text-based description of Distributed Biography.

Distributed Biography is a web 2.0-based application created to support groups of individuals in their efforts to narrate shared experiences about people, events or locations in ways which interrupt monolithic conceptualizations of identity. (Steven: I immediately bought in on the notion that "things" could be biographically constructed, as well.) The genesis for the project emanated from a series of meetings held during the summer of 2006 between several members of what would eventually become the Digital Spaces Working Group (DSWG). (Curtis: I was presented the idea later in the summer. At first, when Justin described it, I listened to it like a product pitch. But then I became interested in its possibilities in more theoretical/pedagogical arenas.)

and

Distributed Biography is an online application that supports the creation, collection, compilation and display of written narratives by multiple individuals about an individual of mutual interest. Previous attempts at co-constructed online biography have tended to suffer from a need to distill their subject’s life into a chronological listing of dates and events narrated in a totalizing voice – thus leaving no space for fragmented, possibly incongruous first and second-hand accounts of interpersonal experiences in which one or more writers and the subject took part. This totalizing, category-driven structure is illustrated by online biographies –which though co-constructed, are long on dates and short on affect. Our tool centers on the periphery of identity in constructing assemblages of short to medium length experiential narratives linked to one another via temporal, geographical, emotional and other loosely coupled folksonomies or lines of flight. The periphery places the banal on similar footing with the quintessential, exposing it even for the damage it does to the biographed. Within Deleuze and Guattari's construct of the rhizome, several principles are outlined, these served as guides for DB. They suggested that we create tools and containers that encouraged heterogeneity; make multiple and overlapping connections possible; support multiplicity; create an asignifying environment in the face of rupture; lean on cartographic notions which privilege no sequence or starting point over others; and present trajectories that allow for flexibility and adaptability which rise to the level of decalcomania.

and

DB is an application that attempts to reduce the organizational, logistical and collaborative overhead associated with the biographical process while at the same time supporting polyphonic (potentially cacophonic) constructions of subjects about whom co-biographers share one or more mutual experiences. The benefits of a less-monolithic, more-anecdotal/blended genre biography include an increasingly flexible and complex rendering of a subject’s identity.

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Distributed Biography aims to support the production of biographies that are not reductionist like some merged documents can be. There's no intention for contributing writers to collaborate to produce a single document. All ideas are included and unedited. Much like the subject himself or herself, his or her biography comprises conflicting claims and tensions; it’s a collection of stories by users, each of whom perceives the target in a particular way in each story, and probably in different ways across different stories. Perhaps these users realize, or will come to realize, that the subject will always be secondary to users’ perception of him or her through their own stories and/or through other stories that comprise the biography.

but not

a wiki which supports group editing

and not

a blog which relegates the comments of others to the bottom of the post privileging the author

An artistic metaphor:

Distributed Biography is like a post-1988 Chuck Close painting. Each story is like a square/pixel. Together they bring the subject into view.