Using Google Wave for Academic Collaboration

I have been wanting to get out a paper on some of my undergraduate research and with my impending cross-country move, it’s moved back up the priority queue. In preparing this paper I will be collaborating with my PI as well as the then-senior grad student, now-postdoc who helped me at the time. This seemed like the ideal application for Google Wave, but I’ve found that while rich with potential, the service isn’t quite good enough to be useful.

One of the key strengths isn’t the real-time chat around a document—that feature is already a part of Google Docs—but the ability to do version control and change tracking. In Microsoft Word, the de facto document editor, track changes quickly gets out of hand, taking up increasing amounts of space until whole pages are dedicated to margin comments. Additionally, once changes have been accepted, there’s no way to see the history of the document’s changes over time.

Wave’s playback feature hints at this functionality but it’s terribly arcane. It automatically places the cursor at the beginning of the timeline, not the the end with the most recent changes. There’s also no way to toggle recent changes in the main document view without loading up the whole playback interface.

Wave also has a hard time handling inline images: It cannot wrap text around them, you can’t zoom in from the slideshow view, and while you can toggle between thumbnail and fullsize view, if the image is larger than your screen you can’t minimize it without zooming out via the browser.

Finally, to be an effective academic authoring tool, Wave needs something like Zotero‘s plugin for Word and Writer to manage citations, or at the very least, a smooth way to transition waves to and from office software that does support them. Ideally, in this setting Wave would act like an upgraded version of Google Docs. Collaborators on the Wave could gather around a central core of documents, leaving comments, live chatting when necessary, and gaining a robust ability to monitor and track changes. At any point the collaborators could export the document portion of the wave to another format for printing, emailing, and distributing.

Wave’s strength is that there are almost always multiple contributing authors on a paper like this, all of whom want to see what’s going on and make changes. You have to discuss things in meetings and incessantly trade files back and forth via email. Having been through this before, I thought Wave was going to be the perfect solution; it seems expressly designed for this scenario. Unfortunately my collaborators eventually became frustrated enough that I had to abandon it. Hopefully the service will improve to the point that I’ll be able to try again on my next paper—emailing files is so naughties. When did you think this was, 2009?