In analyzing affiliation in projects, you often discover that a project can be as much centered on an institution as on a person or a product but also could be highly distributed, with no recognizable center at all.

One of DH2011′s MCNs* Beth Nowviskie has addressed a thorny issue of Digital Humanities scholarship, how and where to give credit for collaborative work.  It’s excellent and it highlights many of the issues of description and evaluation of collaboratively-engaged scholarship.

I think we can trace a good deal of that silence to a collective discomfort, which a lot of my recent (“service”) work has been designed to expose — discomfort with the way that our institutional policies, like those that govern ownership over intellectual property, codify status-based divisions among knowledge workers of different sorts in colleges and universities.  These issues divide DH collaborators even in the healthiest of projects, and we’ll have time, I hope, to talk about them.

While much of the time I’m called upon to develop software or data structures for digital humanities work, a large part of supporting the DH here at Stanford is to provide basic explanations of modern project management and peer collaborative structures, tools and techniques.  Humanities scholars are traditionally accustomed to being entirely self-contained, with instruction or interaction–not collaboration–best describing their manner of contact with those that create, maintain and populate digital objects or tools.  There’s not just an unfamiliarity with collaborative projects, but a mistrust of them resulting from the perception that they are exploitative of graduate students or junior faculty.  They can be, if we don’t all take Nowviskie’s points very seriously and integrate them into our concept of modern humanities scholarship.

*Most Central Node