COLLABORATION IN DIGITAL HUMANITIES RESEARCH – PERSISTING SILENCES

Collaboration has become a hallmark of Digital Humanities (DH) research. Nonetheless it remains under­discussed and for those not deeply engaged in DH a bit of a mystery. Drawing on recent DH work and publications that engage with questions of DH collaboration in different ways (e.g. [Deegan and McCarthy] [Griffin and Hayler 2016] [Hayler and Griffin 2016]), we analyse three types of DH collaboration: 1) human­human interactions; 2) human­ machine/material interactions; and 3) machine/material­machine/material interactions. We argue that engagement with collaboration processes and practices enables us to think through how DH tools and practices reinforce, resist, shape, and encode material realities which both pre­exist, and are co­produced by them. We suggest that understanding these entanglements facilitates a critical DH in which academic hierarchies and disciplinary preconceptions are challenged. Collaboration has become a hallmark of Digital Humanities (DH) research [Nowviskie 2012], with scholars either actively engaging with various parties across and outside of the university or becoming increasingly aware that this is what they should be, or are at least expected to be, doing. In the European survey on scholarly practices and digital needs in the arts and humanities [Costis et al. 2017, 6], for example, seven out of ten Digital Humanities researchers said they “often or very often” engage in collaboration. Nonetheless, or perhaps because of this generalized practice,collaboration has become increasingly taken for granted. However, we would like to suggest that it remains under­developed in both theory and practice, particularly with regard to partnerships that occur between academic and non­academic (typically technical) collaborators and between human and non­human actors (which, we argue, might productively be thought of as collaborators in the co­production of certain resources and forms of knowledge). Collaboration in DH research has not been ignored,[1] but it is still under­discussed in the field, particularly with regard to its diversity and subtlety. This can lead to particular kinds of omission in the discourse around collaborative projects. We were reminded of this during 2014­15 when we co­edited two volumes on Research Methods for Digital Humanities – one on “reading” digital data [Griffin and Hayler 2016], the other on “creating and curating” such data [Hayler and Griffin 2016]. The aim of these volumes was to capture some sense of the range of research methods that contribute to the Digital Humanities. We therefore asked our contributors to discuss the research process of actual DH projects they had undertaken, and expected that many of the chapters would include some discussion of the collaboration processes integral to that work. But, to our surprise, despite the fascinating accounts of DH research we received, we were largely met with silence, and even active resistance, to this topic. When we tried to elicit more sustained accounts of collaboration, one contributor emailed the following: The way I/we see it, DH is not a method. It is an explorative field of research where we use digital tools and materials to revisit and map out new ways in the motley field of humanities, with its many different disciplines, often described as a big tent. We try to capture some of this richness in our chapter by addressing central methodological issues we see in different practices in[our disciplinary field]. Going into technical detail in one project is not in our interest, and we do not think it will be useful for the readers of your book to get a detailed technical account when entering a field of constant technological development. What we focus on is rather to set forth more longlasting opportunities and challenges. (Email communication to Griffin and Hayler, 5/6/2015)[2] We certainly have some sympathy with the view that DH is not simply a method, or set of methods, though some processes and practices have certainly come to typify the field as it stands.