Who's Who in Digital Humanities Collaboration

Spiro, Lisa. "Examples of Collaborative Digital Humanities Projects." Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (blog). Posted June 1, 2009. Available at: http://digitalscholarship.wordpress.com/2009/06/01/examples-of-collaborative-digital-humanities-projects/. (Accessed November 8, 2009).

In a long and wonderfully detailed blog post (yes, it even has footnotes!), Lisa Spiro provides a descriptive overview of collaboration in digital humanities projects. She begins by noting that historically collaboration has not been a part of the publication model in the humanities. As evidence, she cites her own finding that between 2004 and 2008 only 2% or the articles published in American Literary History were co-authored. Similarly, she notes that Cronin et al found in their longer-ranging survey that only 2% of articles published between 1900 and 2000 in the philosophy journal Mind had more than one author. Spiro, however, observes that the humanities do have an extensive tradition of circulating and providing feedback on one another's work, and that new digital technologies such as CommentPress and Zotero are helping to facilitate the exchange of ideas. For Spiro (and John Unsworth, whom she cites), collaboration in the digital humanities holds much potential: "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 she suggests that the incidence of humanities collaboration in the digital environment is higher than in the paper and ink world.

Spiro's discussion of collaboration only sometimes overlaps with the notion of data sharing in the sciences. I wonder if the differences between what counts as raw "data" in the humanities (i.e. primary sources--books, artworks, historical documents) vs. in sciences (i.e. observed and experimental data) means that collaboration is a more useful concept for the humanities than is data sharing.

Spiro spends the lion's share of her blog post providing detailed examples of different types of collaboration in the humanities. She explains that she was having difficulty articulating how collaboration functions in humanities research until she began exploring concrete examples. She divides the types of collaboration into three main categories: "facilitating communication and knowledge building," "sharing and aggregating content," and "collaborative annotation, transcription, and knowledge production." Classified under each heading are more discrete project types. Here is a skeleton of how she schematizes collaboration in the digital humanities (though, as she notes, there is inevitably some overlap among the types of collaboration:

Facilitating communication and knowledge building:

• Online communities/virtual organizations (e.g. listservs, online forums, online communities, advanced video conferencing)
• Collaboratories (which are virtual research environments that use advanced networking, remote instrumentation, databases, and digital libraries to foster "communication, collaboration, resource sharing, and research regardless of physical distance.")

Sharing and aggregating content:

• Digital memory banks/user-contributed content (i.e. various projects to which users can contribute their own content, sometimes with the help of flickr and youtube, such as The Hurricane Digital Memory Bank and the Oxford-sponsored Great War Archive.)
• Content aggregation and integration (i.e. federated digital collections which draw from a variety of archives to overcome the "silo" effect that can plague individual institutional collections. Two examples Spiro gives are the Walt Whitman Archive’s Finding Aids for Poetry Manuscripts and the the Quilt Index.)
• Data sharing (e.g.Open Context , an archaeology project that permits researchers to upload, tag, analyze and share data sets).

Collaborative annotation, transcription, and knowledge production:

• Crowdsourcing transcription (these include efforts that attempt to crowdsource transcription, just as Project Gutenberg and Project Madurai are crowdsourcing the proofreading of OCR texts).
• Collaborative translation (e.g. Suda Online (SOL), which "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.")
• Collaborative editing (wherein collaborative online editions of texts are made)
• Social bibliographies, collaborative filtering, and annotation (including platforms like zotero and eComma, which enable sharing bibliographies and collaborative annotation respectively)
• Collaborative writing (e.g. subject wikis such as the Pynchon Wiki.)
• Gaming: "collaborative play" and games as research (wherein "games provide motivation and a structure for collaboration" and "teamwork enables puzzles to be solved more rapidly.")
• Publishing (Spiro's examples include posting materials online for peer-to-peer reviews prior to print publication)
• Social learning (wherein participating in digital projects is a form of apprenticeship for undergraduates and graduate students, as they digitize materials, provide metadata, do programming, or contribute to a wiki).
  

I'd actually like to pause on this last item for a minute since it raises some of the same questions regarding the changing nature of authorship in the digital environment that we've been discussing throughout the course of the semester. Spiro's entry on "social learning" makes me a little uneasy since she frames the students' contributions as an interactive mode of "learning" rather than "authoring"--sure, they're learning, but they are also generating content as well. One thing I'd really like to see is a discussion of how digital collaboration is transforming notions of authorship in the humanities. Lisa Spiro recently blogged on the topic, but it wasn't quite as down and dirty as I wanted it to be. It is, however, an area in which she's conducting ongoing research.

In general, Spiro's blog entry on humanities collaboration is more descriptive than analytic. She doesn't really delve into the logic of her classifications or the problems associated with "social scholarship" (though she does link to an earlier blog of hers addressing this second topic). Accordingly, her piece is useful for familiarizing oneself with the types of collaboration going in the humanities, rather than thinking through the meaty issues associated with collaboration and sharing. Perhaps it might be worthwhile to consider such matters from a humanities perspective in class.

Keeping up with the Sciences: Humanities and Cyberinfrastructure

Crane, Gregory, Alison Babeu, and David Bamman. "eScience and the Humanities." International Journal on Digital Libraries 7, no. 1 (2007): 117-122.

In this article, Crane, Babeu, and Bamman suggest that though those in the humanities are increasingly working with large digital datasets, they are lagging behind their scientific peers in developing the cyberinfrastructures necessary to support and maintain digital resources. As with the sciences, the humanities need cyberinfrastructure to help address both the massive scale of digital data and the fact that managing this data requires specialized knowledge beyond the capacity of any single researcher. Unfortunately, the humanities have been slow to develop such infrastructures due, in part, to disparities in funding between the sciences and the humanities. The authors note, for example, that the budget of the National Science Foundation (NSF) is 39 times larger than that of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). However funding is not the only culprit. Crane et al. also suggest that a failure of imagination has impeded the humanities: that is, they have been slow to recognize the types of intellectual activity that emerging cyberinfrastructures might support.

In order to grow cyberinfrastructure, the article recommends that the humanities systematically develop alliances with the sciences and other better-funded disciplines, as well as collaborate with them on shared technological interests. International collaboration must also be encouraged. To this end, the authors enumerate five core services that they assert reflect "a convergence of interests that extends beyond the humanities" (120). These services include: 1) Conversion of page images to digital text (including handwritten documents that pre-date the advent of printing), 2) conversion from raw text to structured data (including semantic classification, indentifications, and morphological and syntactic analysis) 3)support of multiple languages (including cross-language information retrieval), 4)customization and personalization of data retrieval, and 5) the support of continuous user contributions (such as corrections of OCR errors). Crane et al. close by recommending that the humanities strive to develop larger, more stable organizational structures (as opposed to constantly re-inventing the wheel in numerous small-scale projects) in order to ensure the maintenance of digital data services. They also hold out hope for the emergence of disciplinary centers--such as one for classicists--to attend to the specialized needs of their constituents.

Though one imagines that the article is meant to rally the humanities and provide real-world strategies for confronting difficult funding situations, the effect is still somewhat depressing. Identifying overlapping interests makes good financial sense, but it seems important too to recognize and investigate significant areas of divergence between the sciences and the humanities. For example, how do humanities "datasets" differ from those in the field of science and social science and what type of functionality would humanities data benefit from most? What constitutes pre-publication "raw data" in the humanities? How does the data life cycle for humanities materials compare with that which Anna Gold outlines for the sciences in "Cyberinfrastructure, Data, and Libraries, Part 1?" Where significant differences exist, what are the cyberinfrastructure implications of these differences? As this week's article by Inge Angevaare notes, a vital part of any digital curation plan is identifying and attending to the needs of one's designated community.

Collaboration with the sciences is undoubtedly key to developing a more robust cyberinfrastructure for the humanities, but, at the same time, humanities agendas should not be unduly shaped by the interests of the sciences. Sharing resources only works in so far as the end product serves the needs of both parties.