Just for kicks, I’ll say a little about a tiny part of what I’m working on: it’s about the question of thinking about digital scholarship/digital humanities from an additive standpoint, vs from a collective standpoint.

By thinking about DH/DS from an additive standpoint, I mean that we often think of what we need, like: “Degree programs + Librarians to teach skills + Technical infrastructure + Funding =
Digital scholarship success”

It’s very much “oh, we could do X, if we had A, B, and C” — & I’m not criticizing us for thinking about DH this way. There are lots of structural components that encourage it.

The challenge, I would say, is that this sort of thinking drives us towards always feeling like we don’t have enough. We need more. (And to be fair, in an age of defunding, that’s a valid instinct to have much of the time.)

But I still think it’s worth being aware of how this additive thinking shapes DS — in part because I think it emphasizes scarcity, competition for resources, & individualism, whether the individual is a person or a center.

I think this grows out of a presentation on the topic of collaboration that I gave at ACH2019, which, in itself, grew out of a Twitter thread. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1l4gDCV-g5Q1f_DBa2JSRA5wc0oMa6P-ZNqQ8EiO8W_8/edit

The more I thought about DH/DS as being shaped by additive thinking, the more curious I became about what it would be like to imagine DH/DS from a more collective standpoint, and what that would even mean.

I don’t have a complete answer yet, but that’s partly because I think the answer should be expansive — not, like, a complete list.

Here are some of the things I think that DH from a more collective standpoint implies: 1) far more emphasis on interoperability and reusability than we currently have.

I would say that our previous traditions in academia encourage us to put a lot of focus on what analysis shows / the answer to the research question / the crux & revelation of the argument. (These aren’t bad things, any of them, to be clear.)

My discomfort with them is really with the fact that I think we prioritize them soooooooooo much that a lot of other stuff (including work involving interoperability and reusability) gets shoved to the side, and sometimes forgotten.

Like I said: there’s a lot of structural stuff (tenure reqs, etc) that push us towards this. Even project genres, I would argue, though I’m not going to go into that in this thread.

When I say that the work of reusability and interoperability gets shoved to the side, or done casually/carelessly, I mean that ... some projects make components available, offhandedly (“let’s throw the data into a GitHub repo”), but many don’t.

Data and project components frequently don’t get licensed either (though I want to be clear that there are frequently complexities here, sometimes around copyright/IP, or ethics, etc).

Lest I sound sharply critical to some people: this thread isn’t meant as some sort of grand j’accuse. It is meant to raise the question: how else could we think about DH/DS work differently, with more awareness of the way it’s been shaped?

One more thing about reusability: academia is pretty interested in citation tracking. But that gets quantitative in a reductive way pretty fast; leads to a lot of handwringing about impact factor, etc — and I would love to see us as a field go beyond that. One way, I think...

...which involves copyright and licensing, would be to explicitly license components for adaptation/derivatives/modification whenever we can. (If you think that this thread is influenced by my being a copyright librarian who sees a lot of scared (re)users, you’re right!)

I have a meeting at 9, & I haven’t showered yet! But I want to say a bit about interoperability, and then tie this off: we’re getting better about doing environmental scans in DH work, particularly for grant apps. Even then, I think the scan is mostly about showing that...

...this grant app is worthy because the work isn’t duplicative. And that’s only part of the thing that a good enviro scan should do. It should influence/encourage considerations of data models and project structure, as well as the artifacts that are created.

Sometimes I see an enviro scan even mention having a couple of consultative meetings w/teams from similar projects. That’s great! But I think collectively means going even further: imagining questions like “what could a future user who had components from both our projects do?”

Again: our structures, our CVs, etc, don’t encourage this. Hell, our labor loads don’t encourage it, and I worry about that a lot lately in ways not dissimilar to this: https://twitter.com/scott_bot/status/1339561811021017089

But I don’t think we’re inevitably doomed to buckle; I think that we can make conscious choices that make collectivity a priority that it isn’t currently, because like so many things, it’s way more than being “nice.”

Anyways: I need to get out of my pajamas! But I’m going to be talking about the question of additive/collective DH, specifically as it relates to data creation and curation, for @APPRecovery on January 25th at 2pm Central. So I’ll say more then!

And I’ll be citing this excellent new paper from @terrainsvagues & others, which touches on some related territory: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-020-00647-z