Synchronous and asynchronous collaborative writing

Collaborative writing has been greatly stimulated by digital technologies, particularly by word processors that have made it easy for co-authors to exchange and edit texts and also led to the development of many experimental tools for collaborative, synchronous writing. When the world wide web was established, the arrival of wikis was hailed with great enthusiasm as an opportunity for joint knowledge creation and publishing. Later, cloud-based computer systems provided another powerful access to collaborative text production. The breakthrough for synchronous collaborative writing was the release of Google Docs in 2006, a browser-based word processor offering full rights to up to a hundred users for synchronous access to a virtual writing space. Next to its easy accessibility, it was the free offer of Google Docs that opened this new chapter of writing technology to a broader audience. When Microsoft and Apple followed with their own online versions, collaborative writing became an established standard of text production. In this chapter, we trace back what collaboration through writing means and then look at the new opportunities and affordances of collaborative writing software. Finally, we briefly recount the impact of early technologies before we settle on the current generation of collaborative writing tools.