The Role of Fiction in Science (A Discussion)

For this project I worked with rachelr, ckosarek and ewashburn on a collaborative tumblr/facebook page wherein we explored the role of fiction in science.
Like ckosarek and ewashburn, I thought that our project strayed a little from our guiding topic, but I'm not sure if that's a negative or just a testament to how our topic, like literature in general, has branched down different avenues of our own individual interests. I agree that the wider collaborative nature of owr project, through which we hoped to invovled others in the community outside of this class, was less than entirely successful. I think that if we were to re-do this project, more of my focus would be put into guiding the attention of others to the sites we created and encouraging them to contribute to the ongoing conversation. I think that the facebook is actually the forum to do this on, as facebook is a slightly more universal medium than the other two sites, and more user-friendly (at least, in my opinion).
I tried to use the tumblr to write about topics as diverse as ancient magic and choose-your-own-adventure stories, topics which at first seem unrelated to science but which, I hope, allowed me to shed some light on the many connections between science and fiction.
I think our project's greatest success was in bringing cross-disciplinary viewpoints to the table. With a collection of links from various online news journals and comedy blogs and tumblr posts spanning disciplines such as linguistics, biology, history, classics and English (though I'm sure I've left out a few), I think we've managed to prove that evolutionary thought applies to many subjects, and allows us to bring knowledge from many different sources.
 
--katlittrell