A key feature of collaboration is having a log of what and how is being done-for private use/reuse and for sharing selected parts with collaborators in today's complex, large scale scientific/software environments. Even better if this log is automatic, created on the fly while a scientist or software developer is working in a habitual way, without the need for extra efforts. The CAVES (Collaborative Analysis Versioning Environment System) and CODESH (COllaborative DEvelopment SHell) projects address this problem in a novel way, building on the concepts of virtual state and virtual transition to provide an automatic persistent logbook for sessions of data analysis or software development in a collaborating group. Repositories of sessions can be managed dynamically to record and make available in a controlled way the knowledge accumulated in the course of a scientific or software endeavor. Heraclitus asked: How can you bathe in the same river twice? Quine answers: It's easy, though it is hard to bathe in the same water twice.
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