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wonder if the differences between what counts as raw "data" in the humanities (i.e. primary sources--books, artworks, historical documents) vs. in sciences (i.e. observed and experimental data) means that collaboration is a more useful concept for the humanities than is data sharing.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