Creating Ethical and Sustainable Collaborations in Digital Recovery

Creating Ethical and Sustainable Collaborations in Digital Recovery Margaret K. Smith Collaboration in the digital humanities offers rich possibilities for improving scholarship, fostering scholarly communities, and dismantling inequitable systems (Bradley 12–13; Poole and Garwood 186–87). But the frequent references to collaboration found in digital humanities scholarship have rightly been criticized for vagueness and lack of theorization (McCarty 2; Griffin and Hayler 1). The language of collaboration is often used to evoke ideals of parity and equity and a dismantling of academic hierarchy, but without tangible actions to create a truly ethical collaborative community of practice, the rhetoric falls short. Creating infrastructures to facilitate sustainable and principled collaboration is at the heart of the Recovery Hub's mission. From consultation at the earliest stages of brainstorming to peer review and showcasing of projects at all stages of their development, the Recovery Hub's services forge connections among aspiring and practicing digital humanists regardless of institutional context, affiliation, or resources. This essay outlines some models of collaboration and offers some best practices for creating collaborative environments derived from the Recovery Hub's experience in its pilot phase. models of collaboration The relationship between humanities scholar and technical expert is often framed as that of client and developer. This is a deliverable-oriented model—that is, it focuses on a predetermined end product rather than a collaborative process in which both technical and scholarly contributors shape the product. In a deliverable-oriented model, the humanities scholar brings a vision to the developer, who then works (often in isolation) to create a product that matches the specifications. The output is often a black box , the inner workings of which [End Page 215] are unknown to the scholar (Burdick 23). The implicit assumption in such a relationship is that the project's humanistic content and argument are its primary contribution and that the technology simply manifests it (Bradley 11–12). But technology doesn't manifest—it mediates. Each technology brings its own opportunities, assumptions, and constraints that shape the humanistic content in countless ways that remain invisible, even to the scholar, unless they are consciously brought to light. As Anela Chan et al. write, the digital repository is "a place to think through, to imagine what is not present and to interpret what is" (par. 2). Developing a digital project entails a string of choices that inform both the technology and the content, and making informed choices that strengthen the project requires a more equitable and participatory collaborative model. What distinguishes a client-based model from a collaborative one? One key difference requires moving from a specific deliverable as the project's end point toward a process of collaboration that begins from the project's inception. Such a process-oriented model emphasizes the scholarly goals of the project at the outset of a collaboration rather than any single mode of achieving them. Holding too firmly to a single vision (aesthetic, technical, or other) for a project can preclude early interventions by collaborators to address technical challenges or identify stronger technical solutions to support the project's argument and audience. This is not to say that collaborations do not produce deliverables, but that good collaborations embrace process. There are many technical approaches to any given goal, and each brings its own affordances. One of the chief benefits of a collaboration is having a community with whom to think through those affordances and identify the goals behind the imagined deliverable: Who are the audiences you hope to reach? What are the arguments, sources, or tools you want to make available? What are the limitations of resources and access that constrain you, your team, and your users? As technologies proliferate and the field of digital humanities expands, so do our blind spots, so exploring such questions as a team helps us recognize what we don't know and discover possibilities we have yet to imagine. While reflecting on the relationship between product and process, participants in a collaboration can also benefit from more deliberate consideration of whose expertise might strengthen the project. The Recovery Hub blends two models of collaboration: one model harnesses the inherent interdisciplinarity of digital humanities, and the other draws together a disciplinary...