I’ve had two quite different occasions this summer to think about collaboration in the Humanities. The first: a course I taught on blogging in July, which explored how writing, as a first-person and personal craft, is (and is not) changing in the era of social media and digital communities. The second: continued planning of the Food Justice conference, which has provided an opportunity to collaborate with scholars from across disciplines as well as nonprofit leaders, artists and farmers. Having done these things while finishing a monograph has raised the question, not new but perhaps newly inflected, of what collaboration has meant and might come to mean for the Humanities? And so, I thought I’d open this question on Arcade in the hopes of sparking some meaty dialogue on the subject.
For those of us working in the Humanities, our ideas of collaboration are likely all over the intellectual and emotional map. Yet, whether we are involved in a multidisciplinary, multimodal collaborative project (such an NEH Digital Humanities project) or we collaborate mainly at punctuated professional moments (at a dissertation defense, on department and University committees, in editing or contributing to collections), it seems we are all engaging in collaborative work more now than ever. As compared to colleagues in the social and natural sciences, however, collaboration remains a relatively limited piece of how scholarship “happens” in the Humanities––and perhaps especially in literary studies.
This observation gained salience with me as I began collecting bios for the speakers who are participating in the Food Justice conference. As I read through those profiles of scholars working in fields from plant genetics to anthropology, I was struck by the sheer amount of work they do on very large teams comprised not only of colleagues and graduate students but also policymakers, community organizations, government entities and activists. Of course, such collaboration is not particularly new to those disciplines (although its form has been changing with the emergence of new media for capturing, tracking and analyzing research data). Nor should we romanticize collaboration as a panacea for addressing some of the challenges the Humanities now face, and that have been thoughtfully considered on Arcade. Yet, I do wonder what would happen to our various disciplines if we pursued major collaborative grants offered not only by the NEH but by organizations like Mellon, Google, the Ford Foundation, the NEA and even the NES. And I wonder what roles we might play––or how we might expand existing roles––on multidisciplinary research teams that are investigating subjects ranging from climate change to literacy. Finally, I wonder how we might alter our own methods of research to include, for example, public policy and social entrepreneurship.
Some scholars would argue that the horizons of the Humanities shouldn’t include policy (much less entrepreneurship). While I disagree, I concur that the disciplines comprising the Humanities have both historical lineages and emerging methods that distinguish them from the social and natural sciences. The recent experiment at Shakespeare Quarterly to make four essays available online for public, peer review encapsulates this tightrope walk of disciplinary rigor and large-scale collaboration. It is certainly an experiment worth repeating, testing and debating. For one way to reinvigorate the Humanities would be to pursue precisely such opportunities to work with others, to write collaboratively and to think in public––the very opportunities that a forum like Arcade now offers.
Thanks for this Allison. I've thought a lot about the relative infrequency of collaboration in the humanities for a while, moreso from the perspective of authorship than anything else. I spent some time as a technical assistant in a cognitive science lab right after college, which for me mostly meant designing figures and visual models, since I have very little scientific training and was hired mostly for my design skills. But I look back on that experience a lot when I think about how different the humanities are in terms of models of authorship. For one thing, papers with multiple authors are extremely common, which creates a really fascinating nexus of patronage and influence, where the junior researcher's work comes with a principal investigator's name and vice versa, and the order of authorship comes to signal the importance of one's contribution. Part of me wishes such a model existed in the humanities, since it would encourage more communication, especially across generations of scholars. At the same time, senior researchers at least in the lab I worked in had much more influence on their advisees' work partly due to the perceived desirability of an experienced researcher's name on a paper, as well as the material resources the senior person offers in terms of lab space and funding. This increased influence may or may not be a drawback depending on one's perspective.
I really appreciate your comment, Meredith. You articulated, to my mind, the possible gains and losses that would inhere in even greater collaboration within the Humanities -- specifically with respect to collaborative authorship of articles. I am curious to hear even more from you and others on Arcade about how the natural sciences compare to the Humanities in this respect -- and how, in particular, both collaboration and hierarchies structure multi-author / collaborative scholarship in the sciences.
I have to say that even though I wasn't a career scientist then or now, I found that environment really stimulating, everything from the ongoing discussion of collaborative spaces and interactions (compared to individual offices where parameters of contact are pretty set) to the weekly lab meetings where people continually presented their work and ideas. So when things were right, they were quite amazing. However, methodological and personality conflicts were magnified because collaboration wasn't simply a choice but in fact a necessity.
So I personally try to take the best aspects of that experience and apply it to my work today, which is part of why I continue to be attracted to open, collaborative spaces such as Arcade. I can also give you a recent case study of how collaboration worked in my case. I've been working on geometric models of theoretical argument, an idea that came from my interaction with the math professor Daina Taimina at Cornell, and a long conversation with a friend from those lab days, who is now a cognitive science grad student at Berkeley. When I had done my research and prepared a conference paper, I asked both Daina and Dav (the friend) to look at it, and they gave me advice on how to make it better. I also got a physics post-doc friend to discuss some of its details from a physics perspective. Because I initiated the text and came up with the core ideas, I would be a single author from a humanities perspective. But I'm definitely tempted to collaborate with them more extensively when I try to publish work based on this research, and would definitely be open to following a multiple-author model. I'm not sure how it will fly when I submit a paper to a humanities journal with four authors, but I guess we'll have to wait and see.
It will fly. [PMLA paywall].
Thank you for the link to that 2008 PMLA article, Natalia! It's fascinating and exciting to see a multi-author citation in literary criticism like that.
Was in graduate school when I was part of the research group run by the late David Hays. He was a linguist, one of the pioneers of computational linguistics (the term is his) and that's what his research group was about. Though I was enrolled in the English Department (at SUNY Buffalo), as things worked out, that research group became the center of my intellectual life. The group would meet weekly, generally at Hays's home. At the beginning of the meeting everyone got to put an item on the agenda. The meeting went on until all items were covered. Real work got accomplished in that group. Puzzles solved, questions clarified.
Now, the idea was that you wanted to study with Hays because you were interested in his ideas. I mean, why else join the group? So those ideas were the common working language of the group. That is very important. Given that language, fruitful discussion was possible and common.
That language underwent a top-to-bottom revision while I was in the group, a period of four years.