AO: These analysts are worried that although Digital Humanities has collaboration built into its practice, the concept of collaboration is under theorized and also understood in various ways depending on academic cultures. The analysts believe that the concept needs to be better typologized to build a more nuanced discourse of collaboration in order to capture the complexities of collaboration and develop a better language for articulating the fact that coproduction of knowledge is typical and not the anomaly.
AO: The analysts note the importance of noting when power differentials go unarticulated by remaining silent about their processes, sidelining, or invisibilizing, certain categories of workers in DH or academe more broadly. They note that silence is also a form of articulation – it speaks (16).
AO: The analysts note a tension in that collaboration is becoming a demand for humanities scholars even as many types of research audits continue to predominantly consider individual outputs. This analysis is very strong at the meso level, focusing on power differentials within and beyond. They are especially attentive to the material components of collaboration and extend notions of “collaboration” beyond just tech or human but to the human-material and material-material.
AO: The analysts make an important point that others have missed - that some of the collaborators within an endeavor can become marginalized through the denigration of certain kinds of expertise, since “power structures both within and beyond the immediate interactions can lead to the work of one or more collaborators being reduced or going uncredited, and to the detriment of their institutional and subject standing” (15). This is an important nuance and distinct from the point that many have made about the institutional disincentives to collaborate (which favor individual publications and outputs). This point highlights the differential stakes and gains from a collaborative formation. I believe this could be the “discursive risk” in the Matsutake group, during which, as I was reading, I could not help but muse about how, despite the seeming egalitarian intention, Anna Tsing seems to have become more well-known for the group’s work, “benefiting” the most from the collaborative endeavor?
AO: Analysts note the importance of materiality in thinking about DH collaboration, highlighting for example the importance of hyperlinks to challenge default grammars of the book genre and encouraging networked reading.