The Collaborative Digital Humanities Spectrum

The field of digital humanities prides itself on its collaborative practices. Collaboration in many respects challenges the traditional methods of the humanities, and takes researchers beyond our comfort zones. It brings to the fore the ethics, politics, and other complications of shared labour, the various and sometimes competing aims that motivate people to work together, and the risks and benefits of working in groups. This talk contends that digital methods deepen and extend the collaboration already embedded in scholarly practices, even when the work is solo, but also unsettles it. In addition to considering several initiatives, tools, and institutions that stand as examples of particular kinds of collaborative practices, the talk will address principles informing the design of the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (http://cwrc.ca), a virtual research environment that aims to bridge the gap between solo and collaborative scholarship, and between digital and mainstream humanities scholars. It will suggest that open online collaboration has the potential to improve research in a number of ways, more broadly diffusing scholarly knowledge in areas of social importance, improving accountability, and engaging citizen scholars and partners meaningfully in the research process. Yet, as the slippage between spectrum and spectre reminds us, collaboration can also be unsettling and even uncanny, to the extent that it destabilizes old models of interaction and challenges assumptions about scholarly work.