AustLit

Colonial dynamics can exist between fields of research, and in the most problematic cases, a discipline will appropriate the knowledges of another soley on its own terms, distorting meanings in the process. Interestingly, a similar problem exists in the domain of information management, in which computers struggle to automatically transfer 'objective' facts between contexts that actually represent subjective abstractions of reality. In 2004, the authors of this article - a fiction writer and a systems architect - began collaborating with a team of computer scientists to design a knowledge representation system that could track changes in contextual meaning. Our task was to use insights from the arts in system design, without losing the strengths of each field's forms. As the project grew, we discovered how much work and reward is involved in Gayatri Spivak's suggestion regarding collaborative story-building: there is something I want to give you, which will make our shared practice flourish. [Authors' abstract]