Editors’ Choice: Is Digital Humanities a Collaborative Discipline?

Collaboration is widely considered to be both synonymous with and essential to Digital Humanities (DH). This is because one person can rarely possess all of the (inter)disciplinary and technical knowledge needed to implement many DH projects. In DH research literature, in grey literature and on scholarly blogs the collaborative nature of DH is often evidenced by reference to the joint and multi-authored publications that are seen as characteristic of the field. However, literature from the domain of information science emphasises that collaboration and co-authorship do not necessarily have a parallel relationship. There are many reasons for this, for example, different disciplines (and even teams) have different conventions for deciding who should be named on a paper and in what order (only those who wrote the paper? Should those who programmed the computational model that the research is based on be listed as co-authors or named in the acknowledgements?)  Looking to the DH context, we noted that there does not seem to be a consensus about authorship conventions.

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This content was selected for Digital Humanities Now by Editor-in-Chief Ben Schneider based on nominations by Editors-at-Large: Antonio Jimenez-Munoz, Rebecca Napolitano, Freya Zinovieff, Covadonga Lamar, Eugenia Charoni, Grant Glass, Vanessa Stone, Kelly Wall, Marit MacArthur, and Ashley Christie