Houston Startup Weekend Saturday Nov 2011-4 by sarahmworthy

Like THATCamps, Startup Weekends are low-cost ($99 or less), community-driven events that take place around the world and are run primarily by volunteers, who receive help from the Startup Weekend’s central office in staging the event. Startup Weekend provides the key challenge, overarching structure, and access to many of the resources you need to build your project, such as excellent mentors, tools that help you to flesh out your ideas, coffee, good food (including a nirvana-inducing chocolate malt cupcake from Houston’s fabulous Kitchen Incubator), and meeting space.

Kitchen Incubator feeds Houston Startup Weekend Nov 2011-2, by sarahmworthy

Some might wonder what entrepreneurship training has to do with the digital humanities (DH), but I believe that the two communities have much in common and can learn from each other.  As startup guru Steve Blank suggests, startups exist to “search for a repeatable and scalable business model,” which itself is “how your company creates, delivers and captures value.” While DH projects typically don’t form companies and don’t aim to make a profit, most do need to consider how to define their value, find users and sustain themselves. To get off the ground, DH projects go through a process similar to a start-up: identifying a need and potential solution, drafting project plans, putting together a team, building a prototype, iterating on that prototype, and disseminating the product (whether a tool, collection, model, publication, or large-scale research). Both the DH and lean startup communities have embraced similar principles, such as agile development, user-focused design, open source software, and iteration. In a broader sense, I believe that DH brings the spirit of entrepreneurship–taking risks, experimenting, building something that serves a need, innovating, tolerating failure–to the humanities. We can see this spirit manifested in the NEH’s Digital Humanities Start-Up grants, the many digital humanities “Labs” (a term also used frequently by startups and tech companies), and One Week One Tool, which was inspired by “crash ‘startup’ or ‘blitz weekends’.” In a sense, many DH centers serve as startup incubators, providing the know-how and support to help get an idea off the ground.

Events like Startup Weekend could address a need in the DH community for more training in successfully launching projects. Often graduate training in the humanities does not prepare people for the complexities of getting a major DH project started and keeping it going. Such training is now being offered at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (taught by Lynne Siemens, a professor in U Victoria’s school of public administration who does research in entrepreneurship and academic team development), at THATCamp workshops (such as Sharon Leon’s Introduction to Project Management in Digital Humanities), as part of DH educational programs such as UVA’s Praxis Program, and in publications such as Sharon Leon’s Project Management for Humanists:Preparing Future Primary Investigators.  I think StartUp Weekend offers another compelling model for providing training in a fast, fun and experiential way.

Here some ideas from Startup Weekend that I think have relevance for the DH community:

• challenge & competition: At Startup Weekend, your team competes against others to persuade a panel of expert judges that your product is the best. Competition adds energy and intensity to the weekend (and a little stress).
• criteria: In evaluating projects, judges assess customer validation, business model, and execution, as well as overall effectiveness. These criteria help to structure the challenge and give teams concrete elements on which to spend their limited time. If you look at grant guidelines, different terms are used, but the criteria are similar. Have you conducted needs analysis to determine whether there is an audience for your project? Have you validated whether your ideas will meet those needs? Do you have a model for sustaining the project?
• collaboration: Like many DH projects, Startup Weekend requires collaboration among a range of people, including developers, designers, and business development specialists. Not only do you create a better product, but you also learn from each other–and have more fun in the process.
• mentors: Startup Weekend Houston recruited a great group of mentors who gave up part or all of their weekend to work with project teams. Mentors asked tough questions, suggested ways to approach problems, connected us with people who could help us test or advance our ideas, and provided feedback on startup ideas and business plans. The DH community also offers mentors, such as through the ACH mentoring program.
• communication: As you try to explain your project to a range of people, from a provost  to your next-door neighbor, it helps to know how to pitch an idea succinctly and persuasively. At Startup Weekend, the first big event (following noshing and networking) is the pitch, where you have one minute to describe your project idea and persuade others to join your team. Startup Weekend culminates in a pitch contest, where teams make four-minute pitches to convince the judges that their project is the best. Mentors can help you to develop an effective pitch, and you learn by doing.
• tools: The startup community has created some handy templates that help teams crystallize the core elements of their startup idea, particularly the Lean Canvas or Business Model Canvas. Developing such a model forces you to think through key questions and gives you a handy reference as you share your ideas with others.

Startup Weekend has recently begun sponsoring events focused on education, as documented by Audrey Watters’ great series of posts on gatherings in DC, Seattle and San Francisco. Why not Startup Weekend Digital Humanities? Of course, the digital humanities community already offers some events that serve a similar purpose. For example, at this year’s MLA Convention the DH Commons is hosting a workshop in which veteran digital humanists will share tips on succeeding in the digital humanities and lead small group sessions on topics such as project management, community building, and topic modeling. Although the workshop is now full, DH Commons is also sponsoring a project mixer where people can learn about DH projects that they can help out with. If you have a DH project and want to recruit volunteers or spread the word about it at the mixer, please sign up. (I’m a member of the DH Commons team and would be happy to answer any questions.)  In a broader sense, I believe that entrepreneurial thinking can help higher education tackle some thorny challenges, such as improving learning, reducing costs while maintaining quality, and reforming scholarly communication. Thus I’m exploring how to bring entrepreneurial thinking to the liberal arts community through my work at NITLE.

Building on the slides I presented at the workshop, I’d like to offer some ideas for how a newcomer might get acquainted with the community and dive into DH work. I should emphasize that many in the DH community are to some extent self-taught and/or gained their knowledge through work on projects rather than through formal training. In my view, what’s most important is being open-minded, experimental, and playful, as well as grounding your learning in a specific project and finding insightful people with whom can you discuss your work.

[Note: I made a slight correction to the web stats for the Walt Whitman Archive.]

Also, if you’d like to explore the corpus yourself, you can now do so using Voyeur, a terrific text analysis environment developed by Stéfan Sinclair & Geoffrey Rockwell.

In playing around with data from my syllabus corpus last week, I noticed that a few syllabi still had HTML tags, which was messing up some of my results.  I was finally able to upload my corrected corpus to Voyeur and update some of the numbers in my slides.  You’ll notice that the number of times “text” appears across the syllabi has declined to 333–still significant, but smaller than what I previously reported.  I’ve corrected my slides to reflect these updated numbers.

Also, please note that I’m using different sources for the SEASR n-gram analysis (slide 11) and the Voyeur corpus analysis (the bulk of my presentation). The SEASR analysis is based on top-level course web pages that I downloaded into Zotero.  To create the syllabus corpus that I loaded into Voyeur, I tried to include the complete syllabus whenever possible.  However, sometimes the syllabus was divided into separate web pages, so in those cases I captured the course calendar, which typically offered the most detailed information about course content.  I’ll provide a more detailed description of my methodology soon…

Note: I’ve uploaded an updated version of my slides to correct a misspelling of Paula Petrik’s name.  Sorry Paula!

I hope to write up my presentation soon, but for now here are my slides. Note that some pesky HTML tags skewed some of my results, so the numbers will shift a bit.

I hope that the syllabi archive will be a community resource, both for those who want to get ideas for classes and for those interested in what the syllabi reveal about the digital humanities. You’re welcome to join the Zotero group on Digital Humanities Education (you’ll have to have a Zotero account and then apply for membership in the group).  If you’d like contribute syllabi, please place them in the DHSyllabi> Contributed Syllabi sub-collection.  Please note that the metadata in most of the collection is a little messy–I’m discovering that I can be idiosyncratic in my approaching to tagging, and haven’t had the opportunity to polish all of the metadata for the assigned meeting. Also, if you would like your syllabus removed from the collection (I found all syllabi on the web), please let me know.

I’m using Citeline to make available both the 134 syllabi and the collection of readings  I extracted from the reading lists for approximately DH courses (most of which are included in the syllabi collection.) Citeline has some nifty faceted browsing features that allow you to browse by author, date, keyword (tag), etc.

What’s a THATCamp?

At unconferences such as THATCamp, participants set the agenda. Prior to arriving at THATCamp, participants write brief blog posts describing topics they would be interested in discussing. At the start of the event on April 16, we’ll identify common themes and collectively determine the schedule for the rest of the day. Past THATCamps (in places such as Virginia, Paris, Australia, the Bay Area, and New Mexico) have included topics such as pedagogy, GIS mapping, electronic literature, digitization, text mining, social media, information visualization, and crowdsourcing—but what we explore at THATCamp is up to its participants. Think of a typical THATCamp session as a conversation or as a series of hands-on experiments rather than as a formal presentation; no one stands up at the front of the room and reads a paper, and everyone is invited to participate.

On April 15, THATCamp Texas will sponsor a free BootCamp, which will feature hands-on workshops on topics such as visualizing data, creating interactive, data-driven maps using GIS technologies, developing digital exhibits using Omeka, and setting up your own blog or web site using WordPress.

For more information about the THATCamp concept, see http://thatcamp.org/For more about THATCamp Texas, visit http://texas2011.thatcamp.org/

Who Should Attend?

Typically THATCamps attract students, faculty, librarians, technologists, museum professionals, public historians, curators, designers, archivists, and other folks working in the digital humanities and allied fields, but anyone with an interest in the digital humanities is welcome. THATCamp is deliberately “non-hierarchical and non-disciplinary.” You can be an expert or a newcomer—the only requirements are curiosity and a collaborative spirit.

How Do I Apply?

To apply, point your browser to http://texas2011.thatcamp.org/how-do-i-sign-up/and fill out the brief application form. Applications are due by March 11, and we’ll notify folks by March 18 if they’ve been accepted. (We’d like to accept everyone, but we only have space for about 80.)

What Does It Cost?

Nada. But if you were willing to kick in $20 to help cover the costs of food (free breakfast and lunch), we’d appreciate it. We’re grateful to Fondren Library at Rice University for sponsoring THATCamp Texas.

What If I Have Questions?

You can contact the organizers of THATCamp Texas (Lisa Spiro of Rice University, Andrew Torget of the University of North Texas, and Anita Riley of the University of Houston) by emailing thatcamptexas@gmail.com or by calling Lisa at 713-348-2594 or Andrew at or Andrew at 434-996-5741.

We seem to be anxious about the future—heck, the present—of the humanities.  Consider budget cuts such as those at SUNY-Albany and in the UK, the horrible job market, the declining number of majors, and the frequent appearance of articles with titles like “Can the Humanities Survive the 21st Century?”

Instead of focusing on the present in this panel on “Facing New Technologies, Exploring New Challenges,” I’d like to zoom forward twenty years using a process called scenario planning. Essentially, a scenario is a brief story about the future. By working through such stories, organizations can look at the proverbial big picture and devise strategies for facing critical uncertainties in future environments, such as the nature of technological change, the state of higher education, and globalization.  (Given its emphasis on storytelling and interpretation, scenario planning seems like an approach at home in the humanities.)

Recently both the Association of Research Libraries and the Association of College and Research Libraries issued reports about the future of libraries based on scenario planning. (You might have noticed that libraries are also anxious as they face the transition to digital information.) My favorite of the genre is the Library of New South Wales’ The Bookends Scenarios, both because it confronts larger challenges such as climate change and because it leavens gloominess with imagination and humor, such as: “Book by James Lovelock Jnr claims that 98% of human race will be extinct by 2100; 78% of people say they wish James Lovelock Jnr would become extinct by 2029.”

Although scenario planning has its skeptics, I can testify to the ways that it can help people break out of their typical ways of seeing and stimulate their imaginations. Just this week, my library held a retreat based on the ARL 2030 Scenarios.  Despite some grumbling about the unlikelihood of any of the scenarios coming to pass, participants did think deeply and creatively about risks and opportunities facing academic libraries as research becomes more global, entrepreneurial, and data driven. The scenarios sparked conversation.

Today I’d like to put forward three scenarios for the future of the humanities. I’m mashing together the aforementioned library scenarios with the Rockefeller Foundation’s Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development and Bryan Alexander’s “Stories of the Future: Telling Scenarios,” as well as a dash of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. A few caveats: 1) I’m notoriously bad at predicting the future. (I really thought I would enjoy treats whipped up by a robot chef by now). 2) The scenarios are compressed and partial.   3) The future will most likely not be any one of these scenarios, although it may contain elements of some of them. 4) A diverse community rather than a quirky individual should develop and think through future scenarios.

I aim to open up a conversation, not have the final word. (It might be useful for an organization such as CenterNet, the Association for Computers and the Humanities or the NEH to take on this exercise in earnest.) The core question that I want to explore: how can we transform the humanities so that they continue to be relevant in twenty years–so that they “survive the 21st century”?

Critical Uncertainties

In defining these scenarios, I am considering several “critical uncertainties”:

• Teaching and learning: As distance education becomes more dominant, what will humanities education look like?
• Funding sources: Where will money for humanities research come from, especially as public funding is under stress?
• Research methods: How will the availability of huge amounts of data (for instance, the 12+ million volumes in Google Books) affect the way humanities research is conducted?
• Knowledge production and dissemination: How will research be communicated? Will there be free and open access to information, or will it be available only to the highest bidder?
• Environmental, social, political, technological and cultural changes: What will be the impact of climate change, peak oil, population growth, resource depletion, economic challenges, developments in technology, and globalization on the world?

Based on these uncertainties, I’ve whipped up three scenarios. (To conform to the genre, I should offer four, but I can only cram so much into a 12 minute presentation).

I.     A New Renaissance

the green ascent (by vsz)

i.     Summary: Through broad, sustained investment in education, the world enjoys greater equity and opportunity. Interdisciplinary research and international cooperation have led to progress on resolving many challenges, including climate change, political conflict, and resource depletion.

ii.     Research: Humanities scholars are valued for bringing critical understanding to large amounts of data. In collaboration with computer scientists and librarians, humanities scholars devise methods to mine large humanities databases, coming up with new questions and insights that cross disciplinary and linguistic divides. Humanities (and digital humanities) centers help to coordinate much of this activity. Through efforts by leading scholars and scholarly organizations, tenure and promotion guidelines have been broadened to recognize a wide range of work, including scholarly multimedia, online dialogues, and curated content.

iii.     Teaching: Blended learning has become common, with lectures and exercises delivered online and face-to-face time reserved for discussion and collaborative research. Faculty act as guides and mentors for networked research projects that engage students around the world in producing new knowledge. The humanities provide crucial training in curating, contextualizing and interpreting large amounts of data, as well as in critically examining individual objects.

iv.     Scholarly communication: Research is openly available, speeding the pace of discovery and spreading ideas widely. To capture the complexities of their research, scholars produce multimodal scholarship that incorporates video, audio, visualizations, maps, etc.

2.   Humanities, Inc.

Banksy-Cashpoint (by TT)

i.     Summary: As the United States faces economic crises, public funding for education and research erodes.  People feel both overwhelmed by information and hungry for whatever supports their own perspective. Political conflict erupts around the world as a result of resource depletion and climate change, prompting the US to go into a defensive crouch.

ii.     Research: To the extent that research is funded, the money mostly comes from corporations, often with strings attached. Researchers no longer have tenured positions at universities, but move from contract to contract. By necessity, researchers focus on “what pays?”  However, some scholars work with the public to produce crowdsourced humanities research.

iii.     Teaching: Most undergraduate education is offered through distance education; students choose from a menu of choices rather than attending a particular institution.  Instruction mostly focuses on vocational skills. A few elite institutions remain and offer face-to-face instruction for the very wealthy.  Teachers, most of whom are employed by private companies, teach classes with several hundred people, leaving no time for research. Except for a few “rock stars,” the academic labor force is contingent.

iv.     Scholarly communication: Except for crowdsourced information, most research is available only to those individuals and communities who pay for it.

c.     After the Fall

i.     Summary: The devastating effects of climate change, energy shortages, and economic recession prompt a return to localism, so that local communities provide for most of people’s needs. Some areas have descended into chaos or totalitarianism, run by bandits or warlords.  But others have developed democratic local solutions—microindustries, local power grids, community gardens, co-ops. Despite the scarcity of energy and frequent power outages, people occasionally are able to access and share information on the Internet, but travel becomes rare. The humanities provide a respite from day-to-day drudgery and a source of perspective and wisdom.

ii.     Research: Scholars become research hackers, devising solutions to problems both by studying past folkways and by surveying what other communities are doing now. They are resourceful in retrieving information however they can, taking full advantage of the time when they can access the Internet. There is a renewed appreciation for aesthetics, for well-made or meaningful objects. Humanities centers focus on bridging different interests groups working in the humanities, including secondary education and local cultural organizations.

iii.     Teaching: Although much education focuses on core skills such as literacy, craftsmanship, and agriculture, humanists are valued as wisdom keepers and curators of knowledge, distilling what is important on and passing on cultural appreciation.

iv.     Scholarly communication: Given the unreliability of the electrical grid, print becomes valued for its stability.  Scholars frequently participate in public conversations in their communities.

What Now?

Reflections (Kevin Dolley)

1.     Adapt! Engage with and understand technology’s role in the humanities. Like it or not, technology is shaping our future—both how we do our research and, increasingly, how learning is delivered.   Thus we should experiment with new models for teaching, peer review, research, and scholarly communication. For example, the Center for History and New Media have been doing some fascinating experiments to challenge the slow pace of academia and, perhaps even more importantly, create community, whether by crowdsourcing a book or creating a piece of software in a week. Likewise, the Looking for Whitman project is linking together college classrooms in the study of Walt Whitman and engaging students in producing public scholarship. (Whitman would approve, I think.) We need to make visible the value of this kind of work.

2.     Cooperate! Support collaborative, interdisciplinary research.  Such collaboration should occur on many levels: across professional roles, departments, universities, and community organizations. Greg Crane recently made a compelling case that “We need better ways to understand the cultures that drive economic and political systems upon which our biological lives depend.”  To do that, as Crane argues,we need to ask good questions about the connections among cultures, foster dialogue, collaborate with scholars from a range of cultural backgrounds, and make scholarship widely available.  AWe also need to devise ways of dealing with masses of data, both through developing computational approaches and by opening up research opportunities to students and volunteers.

Humanities centers (working in collaboration with libraries and with scholarly organizations) should play a lead role in supporting cross-disciplinary research and in communicating that research to the public. As I found in a recent research project on collaboration in the digital humanities, many humanities departments still do not know how to evaluate collaborative work for tenure and promotion; this should change. Likewise, recognition and support should be given to those in “alternative academic careers”—librarians, technologists, administrators, researchers, and others who are key players in digital humanities initiatives.

3.     Open! Reform scholarly communication so that it is open, multimodal, participatory, and high quality.  If we want to convince the public of the value of the humanities, then we shouldn’t make it prohibitively expensive for them to access scholarship.  Rather, we should come up with sustainable models for scholars to share their research and participate in visible scholarly conversations.

4.     Evangelize! Advocate for the value of the humanities—and indeed of research and education generally. In particular, I encourage you to support 4humanities, a new web site and initiative to advocate for the humanities. Launched by a collective that is coordinated by Alan Liu (I’m proud to be a member), 4humanities leverages the expertise of the digital humanities community to provide tools, media and resources for promoting for the humanities.

The key point that I want to emphasize is the importance of community in facing challenges/opportunities, as well as in advocating for the humanities. (This idea was developed collectively by our ASA panel—Haven Hawley, Charles Reagan Wilson, Elena Razlogova, and myself– during a breakfast gathering to plan our session.) I think digital humanities scholars/practitioners have been pretty successful in building community, using both networked technologies such as blogs and Twitter and face-to-face gatherings such as THATCamp to connect people, ideas and action.  But we can do more. Let’s get moving!

Recently several leaders in the digital humanities (DH) have called for greater inclusiveness. As Geoffrey Rockwell warns, DH risks operating as an old boys’ (and girls’) network because “there are few formal ways that people can train.” Developing and demonstrating the skills required to become a digital humanist typically requires apprenticing on a major project, but not everyone has the opportunity to do so. Further, such an education can be partial, exposing participants to the skills needed for a particular project but not necessarily the broader context of digital humanities.

To provide flexible opportunities for professional education, the DH community should experiment with a distributed, mostly online, open certificate program. I propose a certificate program because it would enable graduate students and working professionals to acquire necessary knowledge and skills without re-arranging their lives to pursue a full-fledged masters or Ph.D. program. Participants would build knowledge, engage in community, produce significant work, and acquire a professional credential that would, one hopes, open up more opportunities.

Not only would such a program offer more paths to entry, but it would also provide a focused way for the DH community to re-imagine how professional education is conceived, structured and delivered. Reforming humanities education should be fundamental to DH’s broader goal to explore “how the humanities may evolve through their engagement with technology, media, and computational method.” DH already has some compelling educational initiatives, such as the intensive learning-by-doing of One Week One Tool; the immersion offered by programs like Digital Humanities Summer Institute and the NEH’s Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities; the student engagement of participatory learning, such as through crowdsourcing grading; the community-based, flexible learning of THATCamp; the multi-campus, aggregated learning of Looking for Whitman; and the networked conversations facilitated by HASTAC and Twitter. Can we build on these efforts and deliver professional education that engages the global DH community, offers project-based learning, leverages the network, and provides participants with key skills and knowledge?

Education, by Xin Li 88

A certificate program in DH would likely have these features:

1. Open: Anyone should be able to use and even to create or modify course materials produced for the certificate program. Openness promotes the values of DH and indeed of education (as David Wiley argues, “education is sharing“). Moreover, the DH community can share labor in developing course materials and keeping them dynamic, fresh, and relevant. Julie Meloni has proposed a compelling model to “Develop Self-Paced Open Access DH Curriculum for Mid-Career Scholars Otherwise Untrained” that I think can be extended to early-career scholars as well.
2. Distributed: Rather than assuming that expertise is concentrated at a particular location, the program would give participants access to experts around the world, who would serve as mentors for projects and online seminars. We can see a model for distributed, open online seminars in massive open online courses such as Dave Cormier and George Siemens’ “Education Futures” and David Wiley’s “Introduction to Open Education.”
3. Community-focused: Already digital humanists are sharing and building knowledge using social technologies such as Twitter, but this approach should extend to education. Students would regularly participate in online forums and other networked conversations with their cohort group, as well as with the larger community. They could also help to coordinate crowdsourcing efforts such as transcriptions or distributed editions, gaining an embedded knowledge of how networked communities work.
4. Balanced between making and reflecting: The DH community has been divided over debates over whether its focus should be computation or theory, method or communication. Why not both? Participants could both build–collections, networks, tools, methods–and reflect on the process, significance, and theoretical dimensions of what they have built.
5. Competency rather than credit based: The traditional course structure may be too artificial, driven by the institutional need to cut up learning into semesters and credit hours. Instead, the certificate program could focus on core competencies for digital humanities professionals, such as a basic understanding of programming, knowledge representation, media studies, digitization, networked communication, and the history of digital humanities/humanities computing. Prior knowledge and participation at other DH events–summer institutes, hackfests and the like–should count. Participants in the DH certificate program could demonstrate their competencies through open online portfolios that would be evaluated by the community through an open peer review process.

Much of what I’m proposing has been kicked around in the distance education and open education communities for a while. But I think the DH community can actually pull something like this off. I anticipate that the greatest challenges to implementing such a program would be eliciting participation among the mentors and learning module developers and coming up with an effective model for administering, financing and certifying it. Perhaps a funding organization with an interest in distance education and/or DH could invest in the program to get it started. Perhaps the program could be coordinated by a digital humanities center, library school, collaboration among multiple institutions, or even by a professional organization such as ACH. My next posts will look at existing educational programs in DH, the DH curriculum, approaches to open education, the structure of a proposed program, and strategies for assessment and certification.

Note: Parts of this post come from my abstract for Teaching Digital Humanities.

Information technology can speed and extend the exchange of ideas, as researchers place their drafts online and solicit comments through technologies such as CommentPress, make available conference papers via institutional repositories, and share citations and notes using tools such as Zotero.  Over ten years, ago John Unsworth described an ongoing shift from cooperation to collaboration, indicating perhaps both his prescience and the slow pace of change in academia.

In the cooperative model, the individual produces scholarship that refers to and draws on the work of other individuals. In the collaborative model, one works in conjunction with others, jointly producing scholarship that cannot be attributed to a single author. This will happen, and is already happening, because of computers and computer networks. Many of us already cooperate, on networked discussion groups and in private email, in the research of others: we answer questions, provide references for citations, engage in discussion. From here, it’s a small step to collaboration, using those same channels as a way to overcome geographical dispersion, the difference in time zones, and the limitations of our own knowledge.

The limitations of our own knowledge.  As Unsworth also observes, collaboration, despite the challenges it poses, can open up new approaches to inquiry: “instead of establishing a single text, editors can present the whole layered history of composition and dissemination; instead of opening for the reader a single path through a thicket of text, the critic can provide her with a map and a machete. This is not an abdication of the responsibility to educate or illuminate: on the contrary, it engages the reader, the user, as a third kind of collaborator, a collaborator in the construction of meaning.”  With the interactivity of networked digital environments, Unsworth imagines the reader becoming an active co-creator of knowledge.  Through online collaboration, scholars can divide labor (whether in making a translation, developing software, or building a digital collection), exchange and refine ideas (via blogs, wikis, listservs, virtual worlds, etc.), engage multiple perspectives, and work together to solve complex problems.  Indeed, “[e]mpowering enhanced collaboration over distance and across disciplines” is central to the vision of cyberinfrastructure or e-research (Atkins).  Likewise, Web 2.0 focuses on sharing, community and collaboration.

Work in many areas of the digital humanities seems to both depend upon collaboration and aim to support it.  Out of the 116 abstracts for posters, presentations, and panels given at the Digital Humanities 2008 (DH2008) conference, 41 (35%) include a form of the word “collaboration,” whether they are describing collaborative technologies (“Online Collaborative Research with REKn and PReE”) or collaborative teams (“a collaborative group of librarians, scholars and technologists”).  Likewise, 67 out of 104 (64%) papers and posters presented at DH 2008 have more than one author.  (Both the Digital Humanities conference and LLC tend to focus on the computational side of the digital humanities, so I’d also like to see if the pattern of collaboration holds in what Tara McPherson calls the “multimodal humanities,” e.g. journals such as Vectors.  Given that works in Vectors typically are produced through collaborations between scholars and designers, I’d expect to see a somewhat similar pattern.)

I was having trouble articulating precisely how collaboration plays a role in humanities research until I began looking for concrete examples—and I found plenty.   As computer networks connect researchers to content, tools and each other, we are seeing humanities projects that facilitate people working together to produce, explore and disseminate knowledge.  I interpret the word “collaboration” broadly; it’s a squishy term with synonyms such as teamwork, cooperation, partnership, and working together, and it also calls to mind co-authorship, communication, community, citizen humanities, and social networks.  In Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky puts forward a handy hierarchy of collaboration: 1) sharing; 2) cooperation; 3) collaboration; 4) collectivism (Kelly).  In this post, I’ll list different types of computer-supported collaboration in the humanities, note antecedents in “traditional” scholarship, briefly describe example projects, and point to some supporting technologies.  This is an initial attempt to classify a wide range of activity; some of these categories overlap.

–FACILITATING COMMUNICATION AND KNOWLEDGE BUILDING–

ONLINE COMMUNITIES/ VIRTUAL ORGANIZATIONS

• Historical antecedents: conferences, colloquia, letters
• Supporting technologies: listservs, online forums, blogs, social networking platforms, virtual worlds, microblogging (e.g. Twitter), video conferencing
• Key functions: fostering communication and collaboration across a distance
• Examples:
  • Listervs: Perhaps the most well-known online community in the humanities is H-NET, which was founded in 1992  and thus predates Web 2.0 or even Web 1.0.  According to Mark Kornbluh, H-Net provides an “electronic version of an academic conference, a way for people to come together and to talk about their research and their teaching, to announce what was going on in the field, and to review and critique things that are going on in the field.”  Currently H-Net  supports over 100 humanities email lists and serves over 100,000 subscribers in more than 90 countries.  Although H-Net has been criticized for relying on an old technology, the listserv, and is facing economic difficulties, it remains valued for supporting information sharing and discussion.  For digital humanities folks, the Humanist list, launched in 1987, serves as “an international online seminar on humanities computing and the digital humanities” and has played a vital part in the intellectual life of the community.
  • Online forums: HASTAC, “a virtual network, a network of networks” that supports collaboration across disciplines and institutions, sponsors lively forums about technology and the humanities, often moderated by graduate students.  HASTAC also organizes conferences, administers a grant competition, and advocates for “new forms of collaboration across communities and disciplines fostered by creative uses of technology.” In my experience, online communities often break down the hierarchies separating graduate students from senior scholars and bring recognition to good ideas, no matter what the source.
  • Online communities: Since 1996, Romantic Circles (RC) has built an online community focused on Romanticism, not only fostering communication among researchers but also collaboratively developing content.  Romantic Circles includes a blog for sharing information about news and events of interest to the community; a searchable archive of electronic editions; collections of critical essays; chronologies, indices, bibliographies and other scholarly tools; reviews; pedagogical resources; and a MOO (gaming environment).  Over 30 people have served as editors, while over 300 people have contributed reviews and essays.  Alan Liu aptly summarizes RC’s significance: “Romantic Circles, which helped pioneer collaborative scholarship on the Web, has become the leading paradigm for what such scholarship could be. One can point variously to the excellence of its refereed editions of primary texts, its panoply of critical and pedagogical resources, its inventive Praxis series, its state-of-the-art use of technology or its stirring commitment (nearly unprecedented on the Web) to spanning the gap between high-school and research-level tiers of education. But ultimately, no one excellence is as important as the overall, holistic impact of the site. We witness here a broad community of scholars using the new media vigorously, inventively, and rigorously to inhabit a period of historical literature together.”In building a community that supports digital scholarship, NINES focuses on three main goals: providing peer review for digital scholarship in 19th century American and British studies (thus helping to legitimize and recognize emerging scholarly forms), helping scholars create digital scholarship by providing training and content, and developing software such as Collex and Juxta to support inquiry and collaboration.
  • Advanced videoconferencing: With budgets tight, time scarce, and concern about the environmental costs  of travel increasing, collaborators often need to meet without having to travel.  AccessGrid supports communication among multiple groups by providing high quality video and audio and enabling researchers to share data and scientific instruments seamlessly.  AccessGrid, which was developed by Argonne National Laboratory and uses open source software, employs large displays and multiple projectors to create an immersive environment.   In the arts and humanities, AccessGrid has been used to support “telematic” performances, the study of high resolution images, seminars, and classes.

CollabRoom by Modbob

COLLABORATORIES

• Historical antecedents: laboratories, research centers,
• Supporting technologies: grid technologies/ advanced networking, large displays, remote instrumentation, simulation software, collaboration platforms such as HubZero, databases, digital libraries
• Key functions: fostering communication, collaboration, resource sharing, and research regardless of physical distance
• Examples:

William Wulf coined the term collaboratory in 1989 to describe a “center without walls, in which the nation’s researchers can perform their research without regard to physical location, interacting with colleagues, accessing instrumentation, sharing data and computational resources, [and] accessing information in digital libraries.” Most of the collaboratories listed on the (now somewhat-out-of-date) Science of Collaboratories web site focus on the sciences.  For example, scientific collaboratories such as NanoHub, Space Physics and Astronomy Research Collaboratory (SPARC) and Biomedical Informatics Research Network (BIRN) have supported online data sharing, analysis, and communication.

What would a collaboratory in the humanities do? The term has been used in the humanities to refer to:

• a network of scholars and centers (HASTAC)
• a national coordinating body and “knowledge resource” for digital humanities scholarship (Digital Humanities Observatory, DHO);
• an interdisciplinary research unit (the University of Kentucky’s Collaboratory for Research in Computing for Humanities, RCH)
• a collaboration among supercomputing centers to support humanities scholars in their use of high performance computing (Humanities High Performance Computing Collaboratory)
• a university-based team that supports teaching and research bringing together computing and the humanities (Wayne State’s Digital Humanities Collaboratory);
• a scholarly web space that supports collaborative annotation and publication (Finding the Celtic)

“Collaboratory” has thus taken on additional meanings, referring to “a new networked organizational form that also includes social processes; collaboration techniques; formal and informal communication; and agreement on norms, principles, values, and rules” (Cogburn, 2003, via Wikipedia).

“Virtual research environment” seems to be replacing “collaboratory” to refer to online collaborative spaces that provide access to tools and content (e.g. Early Modern Texts VRE, powered by Sakai). Through its funding program focused on Virtual Research Environments, JISC has sponsored the Virtual Research Environment for Archaeology, a VRE for the Study of Documents and Manuscripts, Collaborative Research Events on the Web, and myExperiments for sharing scientific workflows.

–SHARING AND AGGREGATING CONTENT—

DIGITAL MEMORY BANKS/ USER-CONTRIBUTED CONTENT

• Historical antecedents: museums, archives, personal collections
• Supporting technologies: Web publishing platforms (e.g. Omeka, Drupal), databases
• Key functions: “collecting & exhibiting” content (to borrow from CHNM)
• Examples:
  When the Valley of the Shadow project was launched in the 1990s, project team members went into communities in Pennsylvania and Virginia to digitize 19th century documents held by families in personal collections, thus building a virtual archive.  As scanners and digital cameras have become ubiquitous and user-contributed content sites such as Flickr and YouTube have taken off, people can contribute their own digital artifacts to online collections.  For example, The Hurricane Digital Memory Bank collects over 25,000 stories, images, and other multimedia files about Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.  Using a simple interface, people can upload items and describe the title, keywords, geographic location, and contributor.  The archive thus becomes a dynamic, living repository of current history, a space where researchers and citizens come together—or, in the terminology of the Center for History and New Media (CHNM), a memory bank that “promote[s] popular participation in presenting and preserving the past.”  As the editors of Vectors write in their introduction to “Hurricane Digital Memory Bank: Preserving the Stories of Katrina, Rita, and Wilma,” “Their work troubles a number of binaries long reified by history scholars (and humanities scholars more generally), including one/many, closed/open, expert/amateur, scholarship/journalism, and research/pedagogy.”  CHNM also sponsors digital memory banks focused on Mozilla, September 11, and the Virginia Tech tragedy.  Likewise, the Great War Archive, sponsored by the University of Oxford, contains over 6,500 items about World War I contributed by the public.

CONTENT AGGREGATION AND INTEGRATION

• Historical antecedents: museums, archives
• Supporting technologies: databases, open standards
• Key functions: making it easier to discove, share and use information
• Examples:
  Too often digital resources reside in silos, as each library or archive puts up its own digital collection.  As a result, researchers must spend more time identifying, searching, and figuring out how to use relevant digital collections.  However, some projects are shifting away from a siloed approach and bringing together collaborators to build digital collections focused on a particular topic or to develop interoperable, federated digital collections.  For instance, the Alliance for American Quilts, MATRIX: Center for Humane Arts, Letters and Social Sciences Online, and Michigan State University Museum have created the Quilt Index, which makes available images and descriptions of quilts provided by 14 contributors, including The Library of Congress American Folklife Center and the Illinois State Museum.  As Mark Kornbluh argues, interoperable content enables new kinds of inquiry: “In the natural sciences, large new datasets, powerful computers, and a rich array of computational tools are rapidly transforming knowledge generation. For the same to occur in the humanities, we need to understand the principle that ‘more is better.’ Part of what the computer revolution is doing is that it is letting us bring huge volumes of material under control. Cultural artifacts have always been held by separate institutions and separated by distance. Large–scale interoperable digital repositories, like the Quilt Index, open dramatically new possibilities to look at the totality of cultural content in ways never before possible.” Other examples of content aggregation and integration projects include the Walt Whitman Archive’s Finding Aids for Poetry Manuscripts and NINES.

DATA SHARING

• Historical antecedents: informal exchange of data
• Supporting technologies: databases (MySQL, etc), web services tools
• Key functions: support research by enabling discovery and reuse of data sets
• Example projects:
  By sharing data, researchers can enable others to build on their work and provide transparency.  As Christine Borgman writes, “If related data and documents can be linked together in a scholarly information infrastructure, creative new forms of data- and information-intensive, distributed, collaborative, multidisciplinary research and learning become possible.  Data are outputs of research, inputs to scholarly publications, and inputs to subsequent research and learning.  Thus they are the foundation of scholarship” (Borgman 115).  Of course, there are a number of problems bound up in data sharing—how to ensure participation, make data discoverable through reliable metadata, balance flexibility in accepting a range of formats and the need for standardization, preserve data for the long term, etc.  Several projects focused on humanities and social science data are beginning to confront at least some of these challenges:
  • Open Context “hopes to make archaeological and related datasets far more accessible and usable through common web-based tools.”  Embracing open access and collaboration, Open Context makes it easy for researchers to upload, search, tag and analyze archaeological datasets.
  • Through Open Street Map, people freely and openly share and use geographic data in a wiki-like fashion.  Contributors employ GPS devices to record details about places such as the names of roads, then upload this information to a collaborative database.  The data is used to create detailed maps that have no copyright restrictions (unlike most geographical data).
  • Through the Reading Experience Database researchers can contribute records of British readers engaging with texts.

–COLLABORATIVE ANNOTATION, TRANSCRIPTION, AND KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION–

CROWDSOURCING TRANSCRIPTION

• Historical antecedents: genealogical research(?)
• Supporting technologies: wikis
• Key functions: share the labor required for transcribing manuscripts
• Examples:
  Much of the historical record is not yet accessible online because it exists as handwritten documents—letters, diaries, account books, legal documents, etc.  Although work is underway on Optical Character Recognition software for handwritten materials, making these variable documents searchable and easy to read usually still requires a person to manually transcribe the document.  Why not enable people to collaborate to make family documents and other manuscripts available through commons-based peer production? At THATCamp last year, I learned about Ben Brumley’s FromthePage software, which enables volunteers to transcribe handwritten documents through a web-based interface.  The right side of the interface shows a zoomable image of the page, while on the left volunteers enter the transcription through a wiki-like interface.  Likewise, the FamilySearch Indexing Project, sponsored by the LDS, recruits volunteers to transcribe family information from historical documents.   (See Jeanne Kramer-Smyth’s great account of the THATCamp session on crowdsourcing transcription and annotation.)  Not only can collaborative transcription be more efficient, but it can also reduce error.  Martha Nell Smith recounts how she, working solo at the Houghton, transcribed a line of Susan Dickinson’s poetry as “I’m waiting but the cow’s not back.’’  When her collaborators at the Dickinson Electronic Archives, Lara Vetter and Laura Lauth, later compared the transcriptions to digital images of Dickinson’s manuscripts, they discovered that the line actually says “‘I’m waiting but she comes not back.”  As Smith suggests, “Had we not been working in concert with one another, and had we not had the high quality reproductions of Susan Dickinson’s manuscripts to revisit and thereby perpetually reevaluate our keys to her alphabet, my misreading might have been congealed in the technology of a critical print translation and what is very probably a poetic homage to Emily Dickinson would have lain lost in the annals of literary history”(Smith 849).

  Efforts to crowdsource transcription seem similar to the distributed proofreading that powers Project Gutenberg, which has enlisted volunteers to proofread over 15,000 books since 2000.  Likewise, Project Madurai is using distributed proofreading to build a digital library of Tamil texts.

COLLABORATIVE TRANSLATION

• Historical antecedents: translation teams, e.g. Pevear and Volokhonsky
• Supporting technologies: wikis, blogs, machine translation supplemented by human intervention
• Examples:
  Rather than requiring an individual to undertake the time-intensive work of translating a complex classical text solo, the Suda Online (SOL)  brings together classicists to collaborate in translating into English the Suda, a tenth century encyclopedia of ancient learning written by a committee of Byzantine scholars (and thus itself a collaboration).  In addition to providing translations, SOL also offers commentaries and references, so it serves as a sort of encyclopedic predecessor to Wikipedia.  As Anne Mahoney reports in a recent article from Digital Humanities Quarterly, an email exchange in 1998 sparked the Suda Online; one scholar wondered whether there was an English translation of the Suda (there wasn’t) and others recognized that a translation could be produced through web-based collaboration.  Student programmers at the University of Kentucky quickly developed the technological infrastructure for SOL (a wiki might have been used today, but the custom application has apparently served its purpose well).  Now a self-organizing team of 61 editors and 95 translators from 12 countries has already translated over 21,000 entries, about 2/3 of the total.  Translators make the initial translations, which are then reviewed and augmented by editors (typically classics faculty) and given a quality rating of “draft,” “low,” or “high.”   All who worked on the translation are credited through a sort of open peer review process.  Whereas collaborative projects such as Wikipedia are open to anyone, SOL translators must register with the project.  Mahoney suggests that the collaboration has succeeded in part because it was focused and bounded, so that collaborators could feel the satisfaction of working toward a common goal and meeting milestones, such as 100 entries translated.  According to Mahoney, SOL has made this important text more accessible by offering an English version, making it searchable, and providing commentaries and references.  Moreover, “[a]s a collaboration SOL demonstrates the feasibility of open peer review and the value of incremental progress.” Other collaborative translation projects include The Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert, Traduwiki, which aims to “eliminate the last barrier of the Internet, the language’; the WorldWide lexicon project; and Babels.

COLLABORATIVE EDITING

• Historical antecedents: creating critical editions
• Supporting technologies: grid computing, XML editors, text analysis tools, annotation tools
• Example Projects:

As Peter Robinson observed at this year’s MLA, the traditional model for creating a critical edition centralizes authority in an editor, who oversees work by graduate assistants and others.  However, the Internet enables distributed, de-centralized editing.  To create “community-made editions,” a library would digitize texts and produce high quality images, researchers would transcribe those images, others would collate the transcriptions, others would analyze the collations and add commentaries, and so forth.

Explaining the need for collaborative approaches to textual editing, Marc Wilhelm Kiister, Christoph Ludwig and Andreas Aschenbrenner of TextGrid describe how 3 different editors attempted to create a critical edition of the massive “so-called pseudo-capitulars supposedly written by a Benedictus Levita,” dying before they could complete their work.  Now a team of scholars is collaborating to create the edition, increasing their chances of completion by sharing the labor.  The TextGrid project is building a virtual workbench for collaborative editing, annotation, analysis and publication of texts.  Leveraging the grid infrastructure, TextGrid provides a platform for “software agents with well-defined interfaces that can be harnessed together through a user defined workflow to mine or analyze existing textual data or to structure new data both manually and automatically.” TextGrid recently released a beta version of its client application that includes an XML editor, search tool, dictionary search tool, metadata annotator, and workflow modules. As Kiister, Ludwig and Aschenbreener point out, enabling collaboration requires not only developing a technical platform that supports real-time collaboration and automation of routine tasks, but also facilitating a cultural shift toward collaboration among philologists, linguists, historians, librarians, and technical experts.

SOCIAL BIBLIOGRAPHIES, COLLABORATIVE FILTERING, AND ANNOTATION

• Historical antecedents: shared references, bibliographies
• Key functions: share citations, notes, and scholarly resources; build collective knolwedge
• Supporting technologies: social bookmarking, bibliographic tools
• Projects:
  With the release of Zotero 2.0, Zotero is taking a huge step toward the vision articulated by Dan Cohen of providing access to “the combined wisdom of hundreds of thousands of scholars” (Cohen).  Researchers can set up groups to share collections with a class and/or collaborators on a research project.   I’ve already used Zotero groups to support my research and to collaborate with others; I discovered several useful citations in the collaboration folder for the digital history group, and with Sterling Fluharty I’ve set up a group to study collaboration in the digital humanities (feel free to join).  Ultimately Zotero will provide Amazon-like recommendation services to help scholars identify relevant resources.  As Stan Katz wrote in hailing Zotero’s collaboration with the Internet Archive to create a “Zotero commons” for sharing research documents, “For secretive individualists, which is to say old-fashioned humanists, this will sound like an invasion of privacy and an invitation to plagiarism. But to scholars who value accessibility, collaboration, and the early exchange of information and insight -– the future is available. And free on the Internet.”

  Similarly, the eComma project suggests that collaborative annotation can facilitate collaborative interpretation, as readers catalog poetic devices (personification, enjambment, etc.) and offer their own interpretations of literary works.  You can see eComma at work in the Collaborative Rubáiyát, which enables users to compare different versions of the text, annotate the text, tag it, and access sections through a tag cloud.   Likewise, Philospace will allow scholars to describe philosophical resources, filter them, find resources tagged by others, and submit resulting research for peer review. Other projects and technologies supporting collaborative annotation include Flickr Commons,  Aus-e-Lit: Collaborative Integration and Annotation Services for Australian Literature Communities, NINES’ Collex, and STEVE.

COLLABORATIVE WRITING

• Historical antecedents: Encyclopedias
• Supporting technologies: Wikis
• Key functions: sharing knowledge, synthesizing multiple perspectives
• Examples:
  With the rise of Wikipedia, academics have been debating whether collaborative writing spaces such as wikis undermine authority, expertise, and trustworthiness.  In “Literary Sleuths Online,” Ralph Schroeder and Matthijs Den Besten examine the Pynchon Wiki, a collaborative space where Pynchon enthusiasts annotate and discuss his works.  Schroeder and Den Besten compare the wiki’s section on Pynchon’s Against the Day with a print equivalent, Weisenburger’s “A Gravity’s Rainbow Companion.”  While the annotations in Weisenburger’s book are more concise and consistent, the wiki is more comprehensive, more accurate (because many people are checking the information), and more speedily produced (it only took 3 months for the wiki to cover every page of Pynchon’s novel).   Moreover, the book is fixed, while the wiki is open-ended and expansive. Schroeder and Den Besten suggest that competition, community and curiosity drive participation, since contributors raced to add annotations as they made their way through the novel and “sleuthed” together.

GAMING: “Collaborative Play”/ Games as Research

• Historical antecedents: role playing games, board games, etc.
• Key functions: problem solving, team work, knowledge sharing
• Supporting technologies: gaming engines, wikis, networks
• Example Projects:
  Perhaps some of the most intense collaboration comes in massively multiplayer online games, as teams of players consult each other for assistance navigating virtual worlds, team up to defeat monsters, join guilds to collaborate on quests, and share their knowledge through wikis such as the WOWWiki, which has almost 74,000 articles.  Focusing on World of Warcraft, Nardi and Harris explore collaborative play as a form of learning.  They also point to potential applications of gaming in research communities: “Mixed collaboration spaces, whether MMOGs or another format, may be useful in domains such as interdisciplinary scientific work where a key challenge is finding the right collaborators.”

  Sometimes those collaborators can be people without specialized training.  Recently Wired featured a fascinating article about FoldIt, a game to come up with different models of proteins that is attracting devoted teams of participants (Bohannon).  The game was devised by the University of Washington Departments of Computer Science & Engineering and Biochemistry to crowdsource solutions to Community-Wide Experiment on the Critical Assessment of Techniques for Protein Structure Prediction (CASP), a scientific contest to predict protein structures.   Previously biochemist David Baker had used Rosetta@home to harness the spare computing cycles of 86,000 PCs that had been volunteered to help determine the shapes of proteins, but he was convinced that human intelligence as well as computing power needed to be tapped to solve spatial puzzles.  Thus he and his colleagues developed a game in which players fold proteins into their optimal shapes, a sort of “global online molecular speed origami.” Over 100,000 people have downloaded the game, and a 13 year-old is one of the game’s best players. Using the game’s chat function, players formed teams, “and collective efforts proved far more successful than any solo folder.”  At the CASP competition, 7 of the 15 solutions contributed through FoldIt worked, and one finished in first place, so “[a] band of gamer nonscientists had beaten the best biochemists.”

  How might gaming be used to motivate and support humanities research?  As we see in the example of FoldIt, games provide motivation and a structure for collaboration; teamwork enables puzzles to be solved more rapidly.  I could imagine, for example, a game in which players would transcribe pieces of a diary to unravel the mystery it recounts, describe the features of a series of images (similar to Google’s Image Labeler game), or offer up their own interpretations of abstruse philosophical or literary passages.  In “Games of Inquiry for Collaborative Concept Structuring,” Mary A. Keeler and Heather D. Pfeiffer envision a “Manuscript Reconstruction Game (MRG)” where Peirce scholars would collaborate to figure out where a manuscript page belongs. “The scholars rely on the mechanism of the game, as a logical editor or ‘logical lens,’ to help them focus on and clarify the complexities of inference and conceptual content in their collaborative view of the manuscript evidence” (407).  There are already some compelling models for humanities game play.  Dan Cohen recently used Twitter to crowdsource solving an historical puzzle. Ian Bogost and collaborators are investigating the intersections between journalism and gaming.  Jerome McGann describes Ivanhoe as an  “online playspace… for organizing collaborative interpretive investigations of traditional humanities materials of any kind,” as two or more players come together to re-imagine and transform a literary work (McGann).

PUBLISHING

• Historical antecedents: exchange of drafts, letters, critical dialogs in journals
• Supporting technologies and protocols: CommentPress, blogs, wikis, Creative Commons licenses, etc.
• Projects:
  Bob Stein defines the book as “a place where readers (and sometimes authors) congregate.” Recent projects enable readers to participate in all phases of the publishing process, from peer-to-peer review to remixing a work to produce something new.  For instance, LiquidPub aims to transform the dissemination and evaluation of scientific knowledge by enabling “Liquid Publication that can take multiple forms, that evolves continuously, and is enriched by multiple sources.”  Using CommentPress, Noah Wardrip-Fruin  experimented with peer-to-peer review of his new book Expressive Processing alongside traditional peer review, posting a section of the book each week day to the Grand Text Auto blog.  Although it was difficult for many reviewers to get a sense of the book’s overall arguments when they were reading only fragments, Wardrip-Fruin found many benefits to this open approach to peer review: he could engage in conversation with his reviewers and determine how to act on their comments, and he received detailed comments from both academics and non-academics with expertise in the topics being discussed, such as game designers.  Similarly, O’Reilly recently developed the Open Publishing Feedback System to gather comments from the community.  Its first experiment, Programming Scala, yielded over 7000 comments from nearly 750 people. New publishing companies such as WeBook and Vook are exploring collaborative authorship and multimedia.

SOCIAL LEARNING

• Historical antecedents: Students as research assistants?
• Supporting technologies: blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, social bibliographies
• Motto: “We participate, therefore we are.” (via John Seely Brown)
• Example:
  As John Seely Brown explains, “social learning is based on the premise that our understanding of content is socially constructed through conversations about that content and through grounded interactions, especially with others, around problems or actions.”  Social learning involves “learning to be” an expert through apprenticeship, as well as learning the content and language of a domain.  Brown points to open source communities as exemplifying social learning.  I would guess that many, if not most, collaborative digital humanities projects have depended on contributions from undergraduate and graduate students, whether they digitized materials, did programming, authored metadata, contributed to the project wiki, designed the web site, or even managed the project.

  Why not create a network of research projects, so that students studying a similar topic could jointly contribute to a common resource?  Such is the vision of “Looking for Whitman: The Poetry of Place in the Life and Work of Walt Whitman,” led by Matthew Gold.   Working together to build a common web site on Whitman, students will document their research using Web 2.0 technologies such as CommentPress, BuddyPress (Word Press + social networking), blogs, wikis, YouTube, Flickr, Google Maps, etc.m  Students at City Tech, CUNY’s New York City College of Technology and New York University will focus on Whitman in New York;  those at Rutgers University at Camden will look at Whitman as “sage of Camden”; and those at the University of Mary Washington will examine Whitman and the Civil War.   Similarly, Michael Wesch, the 2008 CASE/Carnegie U.S. Professor of the Year for Doctoral and Research Universities, asks his students to become “co-creators” of knowledge, whether in simulating world history and cultures, creating an ethnography of YouTube, or examining anonymity and new media.

While collaboration in the humanities is certainly not new, these projects suggest how researchers (both professional and amateur) can work together regardless of physical location to share ideas and citations, produce translations or transcriptions, and create common scholarly resources.  Long as this list is, I know I’m omitting many other relevant projects (some of which I’ve bookmarked) and overlooking (for now) the challenges that collaborative scholarship faces.  I’ll be working with several collaborators to explore these issues, but I of course welcome comments….

Works Cited

Atkins, Dan. Report of the National Science Foundation Blue-Ribbon Advisory Panel on Cyberinfrastructure. NSF. January 2003. <http://www.nsf.gov/od/oci/reports/toc.jsp>.
Bohannon, John. “Gamers Unravel the Secret Life of Protein.” Wired 20 Apr 2009. 26 May 2009 <http://www.wired.com/medtech/genetics/magazine/17-05/ff_protein?currentPage=all>.
Borgman, Christine L. Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2007.
Brockman, William et al. Scholarly Work in the Humanities and the Evolving Information Environment. CLIR/DLF, 2001. 24 Jul 2007 <http://www.clir.org/PUBS/reports/pub104/pub104.pdf>.
Cohen, Daniel J. “Zotero: Social and Semantic Computing for Historical Scholarship.” Perspectives (2007). 27 May 2009 <http://www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/2007/0705/0705tec2.cfm>.
Cronin, Blaise, Debora Shaw, and Kathryn La Barre. “A cast of thousands: Coauthorship and subauthorship collaboration in the 20th century as manifested in the scholarly journal literature of psychology and philosophy.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 54.9 (2003): 855-871.
Cronin, Blaise. The hand of science. Scarecrow Press, 2005.
Kelly, Kevin. “The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online.” Wired 22 May 2009. 26 May 2009 <http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/17-06/nep_newsocialism?currentPage=all>.
Kornbluh, Mark. “From Digital Repositorities to Information Habitats: H-Net, the Quilt Index, Cyber Infrastruture, and Digital Humanities.” First Monday 13.8: August 4, 2008. 
Kuster, M.W., C. Ludwig, and A. Aschenbrenner. “TextGrid as a Digital Ecosystem.” Digital EcoSystems and Technologies Conference, 2007. DEST ’07. Inaugural IEEE-IES. 2007. 506-511.
Mahoney, Anne. “Tachypaedia Byzantina: The Suda On Line as Collaborative Encyclopedia.”  Digital Humanities Quarterly. 3.1 (2009). 22 Mar 2009 <http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/003/1/000025.html>.
McGann, Jerome J. “Culture and Technology: The Way We Live Now, What Is to Be Done?.” New Literary History 36.1 (2005): 71-82.
Nardi, Bonnie, and Justin Harris. “Strangers and friends: collaborative play in world of warcraft.” Proceedings of the 2006 20th anniversary conference on Computer supported cooperative work. Banff, Alberta, Canada: ACM, 2006. 149-158. 18 May 2009 <http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1180875.1180898>.
O’Donnell, Daniel Paul. “Disciplinary Impact and Technological Obsolescence in Digital Medieval Studies.” A Companion To Digital Humanities. 2 May 2009 <http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/view?docId=blackwell/9781405148641/9781405148641.xml&chunk.id=ss1-4-2&toc.id=0&brand=9781405148641_brand>.
Schroeder, Ralph, and Matthijs Den Besten. “Literary Sleuths On-line: e-Research collaboration on the Pynchon Wiki.” Information, Communication & Society 11.2 (2008): 167-187.
Smith, Martha Nell. “Computing: What Has American Literary Study To Do with It.” American Literature 74.4 (2002): 833-857.
Unsworth, John M. “Creating Digital Resources: the Work of Many Hands.” 14 Sep 1997. 10 Mar 2009 <http://www3.isrl.uiuc.edu/%7Eunsworth/drh97.html>.

Revisions: Fixed From the Page link, 6/1/09; Tanya ] Tara, 6/2/09; fixed typos (6/14/09)

“Collaboration” is often associated with “digital humanities.”  Building digital collections, creating software, devising new analytical methods, and authoring multimodal scholarship typically cannot be accomplished by a solo scholar; rather, digital humanities projects require contributions from people with content knowledge, technical skills, design skills, project management experience, metadata expertise, etc.  Our Cultural Commonwealth identifies enabling collaboration as a key feature of the humanities cyberinfrastructure, funders encourage multi-institutional and even international teams, and proponents of increased collaboration in the humanities like Cathy Davidson and Lisa Ede and Andrea A. Lunsford cite digital humanities projects such as Orlando as exemplifying collaborative possibilities.

As a preliminary investigation, I compared the number of collaboratively-written articles published between 2004 and 2008 in two well-respected quarterly journals, American Literary History (ALH) and Literary and Linguistic Computing (LLC).  Both journals are published by Oxford University Press as part of its humanities catalog. I selected ALH because it is a leading journal on American literature and culture that encourages critical exchanges and interdisciplinary work—and because I thought it would be fun to see what the journal has published since 2004. (The hardest part of my research: resisting the urge to stop and read the articles.)  LLC, the official publication of the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing and the Association for Computers and the Humanities, includes contributions on digital humanities from around the world—the UK, the US, Germany, Australia, Greece, Italy, Norway, etc.—and from many disciplines, such as literature, linguistics, computer and information science, statistics, librarianship, and biochemistry.  To determine the level of collaborative authorship in each issue, I tallied articles that had more than one author, excluding editors’ introductions, notes on contributors, etc.  For LLC, I counted everything that had an abstract as an article.  While I didn’t count LLC’s reviews, which typically are brief and focus on a single work, I did include the review essays published by ALH, since they are longer and synthesize critical opinion about several works.

So what did I find? Whereas 5 of 259 (1.93%) articles published in ALH—about one a year–feature two authors (none had more than two), 70 out of 145 (48.28%) of the articles published in LLC were written by two or more authors.  Most (4 of 5, or 80%) of the ALH articles were written by scholars from multiple institutions, whereas 49% (34 of 70) of the LLC articles were.  About 16% (11 of 70) of the LLC articles featured contributors from two or more countries, while none of the ALH articles did.  Two of the five ALH articles are review essays, while three focus on hemispheric or transatlantic American studies.  Although this study should be carried out more systematically across a wider range of journals, the initial results do suggest that collaborative authorship is more common in digital humanities. [See the Zotero reports for ALH and LLC for more information.]

Why does LLC feature more collaboratively written articles than ALH? I suspect that because, as I’ve already suggested, digital humanities projects often require collaboration, whereas most literary criticism can be produced by an individual scholar who needs only texts to read, a place to write, and a computer running a word processing application (as well as a library to provide access to texts, colleagues to consult and to review the resulting research, a university and/or funding agency to support the research, a publisher to disseminate the work, etc.).   Moreover, LLC represents a sort of meeting point for a range of disciplines, including several (such as computer science) that have a tradition of collaborative authorship.  Whereas collaborative authorship is common (even expected) in the sciences, in the humanities many tenure and promotion committees have not yet developed mechanisms for evaluating and crediting collaborative work. In a recent blog post, for example, Cathy Davidson tells a troubling story about being told (in a public and humiliating way) by a member of a search committee that her collaborative work and other “non-traditional” research didn’t “count.”  Literary study values individual interpretation, or what Davidson calls “the humanistic ethic of individuality.”

While individual scholarship remains valid and important, shouldn’t humanities scholarship to expand to embrace collaborative work as well?  Indeed, in 2000 the MLA launched an initiative to consider “alternatives to the adversarial academy” and encourage collaborative scholarship.  (By the way, I’m not criticizing ALH; I doubt that it receives many collaboratively-authored submissions, and it has encouraged critical exchange and interdisciplinary research.)  Of course, collaboration poses some significant challenges, such divvying up and managing work, negotiating conflicts, finding funding for complex projects, assigning credit, etc.    But as Lisa Ede and Andrea A. Lunsford point out, collaborative authorship can lead to a “widening of scholarly possibilities.”  In talking to humanities scholars (particularly those in global humanities), I’ve noticed genuine enthusiasm about collaborative work that allows scholars to engage in community, consider alternative perspectives, and undertake ambitious projects that require diverse skills and/or knowledge.

What kind of collaborations do the jointly-written articles in LLC and ALH represent? Since LLC often lists only the authors’ institutional affiliations, not their departments, tracing the degree of interdisciplinary collaboration would require further research.  However, I did find examples of several types of collaboration (which may overlap):

• Faculty/student collaboration: In the sciences, faculty frequently publish with their postdocs and students, a practice that seems to be rare in the humanities.  I noted at least one example of a similar collaboration in LLC—involving, I should note, computer science rather than humanities grad students.
  • Urbina, Eduardo et al. “Visual Knowledge: Textual Iconography of the Quixote, a Hypertextual Archive.” Lit Linguist Computing 21.2 (2006): 247-258. 5 Apr 2009 <http://llc.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/21/2/247>.
    This article includes contributions by a professor of Hispanic studies, a professor of computer science, a librarian/archivist/adjunct English professor, and three graduate students in computer science.
• Project teams: In digital humanities, collaborators often work together on projects to build digital collections, develop software, etc.  In LLC, I found a number of articles written by project teams, such as:
  • Barney, Brett et al. “Ordering Chaos: An Integrated Guide and Online Archive of Walt Whitman’s Poetry Manuscripts.” Lit Linguist Computing 20.2 (2005): 205-217. 5 Apr 2009 <http://llc.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/20/2/205>.
    Members of the project team included an archivist, programmer, digital initiatives librarian, English professor, and two English Ph.Ds who serve as library faculty and focus on digital humanities.
• Interdisciplinary collaborations: In LLC, I noted several instances of teams that included humanities scholars and scientists working together to apply particular methods (text mining, stemmatic analysis) in the humanities.  For example:
  • Windram, Heather F. et al. “Dante’s Monarchia as a test case for the use of phylogenetic methods in stemmatic analysis.” Lit Linguist Computing 23.4 (2008): 443-463. 5 Apr 2009 <http://llc.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/23/4/443>.  The authors include two biochemists, a textual scholar, and a scholar of Italian literature
  • Sculley, D., and Bradley M. Pasanek. “Meaning and mining: the impact of implicit assumptions in data mining for the humanities.” Lit Linguist Computing 23.4 (2008): 409-424. 5 Apr 2009 <http://llc.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/23/4/409>.
    Authored by a computer scientist and a literature professor.
• Shared interests: Researchers may publish together because they share an intellectual kinship and can accomplish more by working together.  For instance:
  • Auerbach, Jonathan, and Lisa Gitelman. “Microfilm, Containment, and the Cold War.” American Literary History 19.3 (2007).  I noticed that Jonathan Auerbach and Lisa Gitelman thank each other in works that each had previously published as an individual.

Observing that LLC publishes a number of collaboratively-written articles opens up several questions, which I hope to pursue through interviews with the authors of at least some of these articles (if you are one of these authors, you may see an email from me soon….):

1)    What characterizes the LLC articles that have only one author?
Based on a quick look at the tables of contents from past issues, I suspect that these articles are more likely to be theoretical or to focus on particular problems rather than projects.  Here, for example, are the titles of some singly-authored articles:  “The Inhibition of Geographical Information in Digital Humanities Scholarship,” “Monkey Business—or What is an Edition?,” “What Characterizes Pictures and Text?” and “Original, Authentic, Copy: Conceptual Issues in Digital Texts.”

2)    Why was the article written collaboratively?

What led to the collaboration?  Did team members offer complementary skill sets, such as knowledge of statistical methods and understanding of the content? How did the collaborators come together—do they work for the same institution? Did they meet at a conference? Do they cite each other?

3)    What were the outcomes of the collaboration?

What was accomplished through collaboration that would have been difficult to do otherwise?  Would the scale of the project be smaller if it were pursued by a single scholar? Did the project require contributions from people with different types of expertise?

4)    How was the collaboration managed and sustained?

Was one person in charge, or was authority distributed? What tools were used to facilitate communication, track progress on the project, and support collaborative writing? To what degree was face-to-face interaction important?

5)    What was difficult about the collaboration?

What was hard about collaborating: Communicating? Identifying who does what? Agreeing on methods? Coming to a common understanding of results? Finding funding?

We can find answers to some of these questions in Lynne Siemens’ recent article “’It’s a team if you use “reply all” ‘: An exploration of research teams in digital humanities environments.”  Siemens describes factors contributing to the success of collaborative teams in digital humanities, such as clear milestones and benchmarks, strong leadership, equal contributions by members of the team, and a balance between communication through digital tools and in-person meetings.  I particularly liked the description of “a successful team as a ‘round thing’ with equitable contribution by individual members.”

In doing this research, I realized how much it would benefit from collaborators.  For instance, someone with expertise in citation analysis could help enlarge the study and detect patterns in collaborative authorship, while someone with expertise in qualitative research methods could help to interview collaborative research teams and analyze the resulting data.  However, I think anyone with an interest in the topic could make valuable contributions.  This is by way of leading up to my pitch: I’m working on a piece about collaborative research methods in digital humanities for an essay collection and would welcome collaborators.  If you’re interested in teaming up, contact me at lspiro@rice.edu.

Works Cited

Davidson, Cathy N. “What If Scholars in the Humanities Worked Together, in a Lab?.” The Chronicle of Higher Education 28 May 1999. 18 Apr 2009 <http://chronicle.com/weekly/v45/i38/38b00401.htm>.

Ede, Lisa, and Andrea A. Lunsford. “Collaboration and Concepts of Authorship.” PMLA 116.2 (2001): 354-369. 18 Apr 2009 <http://www.jstor.org/stable/463522>.

Siemens, Lynne. “’It’s a team if you use “reply all” ‘: An exploration of research teams in digital humanities environments.” Lit Linguist Computing (2009): fqp009. 14 Apr 2009 <http://llc.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/fqp009v1>.