Common Horizon: data and strategies
by Rafael A. F. Zanatta
The Common Horizon is a project developed by the LLM students (‘15) of the International University College of Turin. The project was developed in April 2015 and the website (www.commonhorizon.com) was officially launched in May 2015.
The Common Horizon has now completed two months of activities. This is a good opportunity to reflect on the data collected by the Medium platform — the one we currently use to publish our texts — and to correct possible failures of our project.
What the data shows us?
The Common Horizon’s first text was published in May 13 2015 (“Challenging the Singular Horizon”, by Giuseppe Mastruzzo). After the inaugural text, we collectively published 32 texts by members of the IUC community.
Roughly, and by average, the website publishes one essay every two days.
Organizing the texts by authors, we have the following order of essays published here:
A. Jinkang: 25 texts
R. Zanatta: 2 texts
G. Mastruzzo: 1 text
J. Halevi: 1 text
U. Reviglio: 1 text
R. Zanatta & U. Reviglio: 1 text
The data shows that A. Jinkang is responsible for the majority of the texts published in the Common Horizon (78,12%).
The Common Horizon was more plural in the first month (June). In the following one (July), it became practically a “one author website”.
The number of viewers and readers of the website also dropped in the second month, as shown below:
The data also shows that the most popular texts were published in the first month of the website. One interesting finding — and quite obvious — is that texts written by professors have a big potential for the website. They attract more readers than those written by students:
As seen above, the articles published by Prof. Halevi and Prof. Mastruzzo were the “top read” essays at the Common Horizon.
Strategies for the Common Horizon
In order to keep the project alive with its goals, we need to enhance the plurality of the website. In other words, we need more authors and we need to avoid that the website becomes a “unique horizon”, only by one person.
This is a not a direct critique to Alagie Jinkang — one of the authors. Jinkang is responsible for keeping the website alive, but we need to be more cautious about the effects of “flooding” the Common Horizon with texts by one person.
The data show us that quantity does not mean more readers. In fact, a big amount of texts by one person might create an adverse effect: readers of the Common Horizon will lose the sense that is a truly collective space for intellectual debates. This is something we should care.
In this sense, I propose two basic policies.
The first one is that we must control the texts in order to allow variation by its authors. This could be done in a very simple way without editors: if the author wrote two texts, just save one as draft. Then, after waiting for a new text (by a different author), publish the one in line.
The second policy is to collect more texts and essays by professors and visiting scholars of the IUC community.
This means restoring the role of the Content Mobilizer — as we thought in the beggining of this project (see the image on the left) — as someone responsible for asking texts to the professors and scholars of the IUC.
This is was I did with Mastruzzo and Halevi in order to launch the project. I simply asked them to write a new text or publish an existing one.
I believe that these two actions might help the Common Horizon and make it achieve its goals, including one of my favorites: to create an “intellectual sense of community”, with shared problems and different ideas relating to them.
