AO: “mistake to view the crowds that are sourced as uninvested or as purely, or neatly, a means to a research end [Wolfenstein 2016].” (18)
AO: Analysts note that in crossdisciplinary collaborations, individuals experience their alterity and both sides’ work is defamiliarized and out of that emerges a need for the construction of roles and responsibilities that allow skill sets to be admitted to a working team. These are often forgotten or left unarticulated (11).
AO: Analysts note that they suggest an approach towards defining “the precise role of dissent within a collaborative ecology” [Flanders 2012, 70] and hold that “by increasing the understanding of what each discipline offers to the collaboration through rather than despite its difference, otherness becomes a tool for potentially overcoming technical, theoretical, and/or creative problems.” (17)
AO: Analysts call for 1) recognition that no collaborator can ever be neutral, and 2) that their roles must be understood as well as possible, before, during, and after the event. Credit and blame need to be attributed, expressed, and shared.”
AO: While the analysts look in interesting ways at collaboration across human - material; material - material ways, they do not talk about ecological ways that these collaborations are structured (e.g. sun, water, ice, etc.)
AO: Analysts cite Hockey (2012) who uses the term “indirect collaboration” to describe the “reusability” of data and tools produced in the academy that find application and use outside of that space, although she also argues that “the humanities computing community has not been particularly good at promoting its activities beyond academia” [Hockey 2012, 90].
AO: Analysts note that an understanding of machines as collaborators in knowledge production, and an awareness of the impacts of materiality on such production, becomes a disciplinary as well as philosophical concern. Specifically, they note the effects, typically on reading, of the materiality of media (e.g. hyperlinks) (28). They highlight a need for appreciation of how agency might always flow back and forth, with humans impacting on technologies and the ways in which they might be deployed, and technologies impacting on their users such that the outcome of use is not determined by either side (32).
AO: Analysts highlight how tools are never neutral and so argue that they, like technicians and crowds, are more rightly thought of as collaborators, whether they are conceived of as such by their users or not.
AO: The authors notes that “collaboration is truly entangled, developing over time in ways which are complex to track.” They seem to be most interested in how collaborations change over time (rather than stabilize).
AO: “Collaboration is fraught, achieved against and despite odds” (26)
AO: The analysts describe collaboration as co-working (often simultaneously). They note that the work might be differentially priviledged, acknowledged or not acknowledged at all. The analysts focus on three kinds of interactions: human-human interactions; human-machine/material interactions; machine/material-machine/material interactions. They note that the third is least discussed. They note failure of collaboration and how it can fall apart and highlight that those are important cases to document and discuss.
AO: Analysts note how Digital Humanities workers can become marginalized through the denigration of certain kinds of expertise, noting power differentials may manifest themselves in myriad ways. They emphasize that 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.
AO: Citing Terras, analysts note that power heirarchies can pressure collaborators into promising too much, or blinding them to the complexity of projects that rely on still new methods and practices (19).
AO: The analysts note that research funders (of humanities projects) are increasingly calling for collaborative research projects, universities in many countries continue to, or start to, base scholars in research clusters, centres, or similar groupings, and an “impact” agenda demands engagement with stakeholders and partners beyond the immediate academic context.
AO: The analyst argue that collaboration has been under and slowly explored in DH research and contributes to maintaining a stagnant culture in academe, in particular in relation to the fact that collaboration structures learning.
AO: The analysts cite similarities with feminist methodological work from the 1980s and 1990s where questions of “what counts” (what knowledge, what skills, what experience etc.) were key to debates about the status of women in the academy and in knowledge production (see e.g. [Harding 1987] [Hartsock 1998]).
AO: The analysts cite Willard McCarthy who suggest that “true collaboration within a group happens rarely” because it requires an “unboss”’, someone, according to McCarthy, who is “primus inter pares”, i.e. an actor able to make calls on what is valid and yet able to step back and allow others to lead and act as the work demands [McCarthy 2012, 2]. This is no easy task.” (12)
AO: Analysts cite new materialism turn in 1970s, Latour, Haraway, Barad (27)