Guideline 1: Know your position. Know your assumptions.
Before beginning or joining a collaborative DH project, situate yourself. Where do you fall in the academic system? What do you see as the risks and rewards for yourself upon completion? I recommend writing this out, and then following the sources based on where you fall and who else is working alongside you.
While critical to the success of most DH projects, support staff often find themselves with the short end of the stick, from pay to something as simple as acknowledgement of expertise. These resources address the pressing concerns of many support staff as well suggesting best practices for collaboration.
Bradley discusses the frequent misunderstandings of "techie"/humanist collaboration in the humanities, and how jobs that require technical expertise (programmers, alt-acs) are often seen as less prestigious than the humanities work.
Using guiding feminist principles, the authors lay out the case that collectors of data are often unseen, invisible, even though scholarly work about the data would be impossible without them. She argues the importance of revealing these invisible creators.
Koeser, a software developer herself, outlines key concerns of programmers, software developers, and other technicians in the DH community. From a lack of understanding of their work by humanist partners, to a lack of reviewers who can analyze the code as well as the interpretive writing, Koeser argues that humanists need to understand that many projects would not be the same, or exist at all, with the programming behind them.
This report highlights key best practice to maintain digital humanities scholarship in academia in the long-term, emphasizing how investment in people and support networks across a university (such as between DH Lab, library, IT departments) are essential, and highlighting how greater assessment work by DH admin at university is needed to see how these are working (or not working) at their institutions.
Interdisciplinary Collaboration
Working across disciplines is expected in DH, and offers challenges as well as incredible opportunities. Between disciplines, cultural norms around reward are different, as is the jargon used. The resources below offer guidance in navigating these rewarding collaborations.
The authors candidly discuss their own experiences working in an interdisciplinary team. They break down three areas of interdisciplinary communication where language tends to fall apart: dialect, metaphor, and articulation. For scholars interested in doing this kind of work, this piece is helpful and down-to-earth.
Flanders highlights the tension that exists in interdisciplinary DH projects, but argues that rather than weakening a project, dissent in collaboration can strengthen a project's academic rigor. Scholars should embrace difference and "dissensus" rather than always striving for a perfect consensus.
The authors analyzed eleven DH projects and their fifty-three participants to identify the overall opportunities and challenges of working as an interdisciplinary team. They discuss conflict as both harmful and potentially generative, as well as highlighting the benefit of having at least one person on a team who can "translate" between disciplines.
Collaborating with Students
While common across academia, the ethical concerns of collaborating with students, even if they are not students in your class, should always be carefully considered. The following pieces explore ethical tensions in working with students and offer suggestions.
This article highlights how the rhetoric around collaboration in DH masks the experiences of students who view their work differently than faculty. The authors include a section of best practices, applicable as a student for self-advocacy and especially relevant to supervisors.
Keralis discusses how often students are the most convenient "crowd" for a given faculty member's "crowd-sourced" project. She highlights how students are not able to give informed consent for their classroom labor, and discusses how individual faculty can move towards existing best practices.
Losh highlights the danger, the paternalism, existing in most mentoring relationships. Losh that DH communities should instead foster several key characteristics: hospitality, generosity, reciprocity, and responsibility, all of which are defined and are for all members of a DH community, not just senior members.
Summarizes ongoing problems with viewing students “as peers/collaborators” and argues that graduate students should always be seen first as students with ongoing pedagogical assessment between mentor and student. Mann argues that by foregrounding faculty obligation to student collaborator's academic and career development, we encourage the long-term health of the Digital Humanities Field.
