In what sense can the Dictionary of Sensibility be said to have a group ethos, or any ethos at all? Of course one of the hopes for collaboration is that group members will become self-conscious about their higher-level critical decisions, and that they will be forced into a consensus (however provisional) on the most important methodological and creative issues of the project. For parts of the project actually co-written, group members must establish a speaking voice that represents them all, idiomatically and temperamentally. But these hopes never really materialized in the case of the Dictionary. Except for parts of the general introduction, none of the project was co-written; the eleventh-hour collection of "entries" generally prohibited us from seeing each other's work in progress until a very late stage; many of the presentational and organizational decisions about the project were handled by individual group members; and, even now, we have widely diverging ideas about the real achievement of the project.
Yet in such a project, there will always be collaboration, no matter how incomplete or at what stage it occurs. Of course we collaborated on the termlist, which was actually easy to write, as the product of a semester of classroom discourse about the language of sensibility. But there were smaller synthetic moments that produced a kind of de facto collaboration. In our term introductions, even though we wrote them individually, we took pains to synthesize the work that the group as a whole had done "within" any given term. In fact, there was a unique thrill in drawing out other group members' conclusions into a more general conclusion that, one felt certain, they never would have agreed with! Additionally, as each group member wrote his or her own entries, the issue of hyperlinks within the project forced him or her to be conscious of ways in which, at least nominally, lines of dialogue could be constructed. While discrete attempts to name and agree upon an ethos or rationale were always abortive, gestures toward such a consensus forced themselves in through the cracks, and are everywhere visible in the connective threads of the Dictionary itself.
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