The project has just published its first product: the PARTISPACE Glossary of key terms of the project. Due to the different national and disciplinary backgrounds of the researchers involved, difficulties in all international collaborative research may arise with regard to a shared conceptual framework.
The process of producing a glossary of key concepts included in the project is meant to reduce this risk – and make the researchers involved aware of the differences in disciplinary and national approaches.
All PARTISPACE partners were first asked to collect key terms they deemed relevant to be included into the glossary. This resulted in a list of around 45 concepts which were reduced in a collective discussion process to around 25 items.
These items were divided between consortium members to be worked upon in teams of 2 to 5. The teams were composed to bring together members from different partners to achieve a maximum of diversity of approaches. The drafts were then distributed among the whole consortium to collect comments. In a final round, authoring teams discussed with commentators on how to settle disputes around single items.
Most of the differences could be integrated in the resulting interim product, some remained open.
The PARTISPACE glossary has been published containing all the remaining open questions and comments on the project website. As it is meant to be further worked on by consortium members during the further course of the project, it is conceived as a “living document”. Technically, it has been uploaded to Microsoft Word Online. This results in the possibility to share a secret link to an editable version of the file among consortium members and a public link to a read-only version where visitors of the website can view, download and print the latest version of the glossary – including comments and alterations made by members of the consortium.