Undergraduate digital scholarship in its current form can be a collaborative and networked enterprise that involves multiple practitioners from a variety of academic contexts. However, no great revolution in pedagogical practice is needed; the tools and methods are before us. Socially oriented projects and platforms within DH are evidence of this shift: Day of DH, Digital Humanities Now, HASTAC, CenterNet, NINES, and DHSI are just a small sampling of community minded approaches in DH. Efforts like these have sought to value social knowledge creation by working to set the conditions for new discoveries in an online social space.

Community formation lies at the base of our model, and successful scholarly communities grow best when fostered by effective mentorship and collaboration. Beyond Marc Prensky’s much popularized but widely discredited description of students as “digital natives,” faculty must be ready to link interpretative priorities with employability and an enduring value of education through transferable, durable, and authentic skills [Prensky 2001].[3] The canon and critical thinking skills once served this language of extensibility in education. Students must be ready to work alongside faculty and staff; in so doing, they undoubtedly benefit from discipline-specific expertise and embrace methods and skills that may not be validated by the very institution that grants their degrees. Therefore, the connection between technology and content must not be missed. There must be an integral and functional connection between the technology, teaching, and team integration. In “Digital Pedagogy Unplugged”, Paul Fyfe recounts his surprise upon learning that “Jerome McGann does not especially like computers”  [Fyfe 2011, 1]. The affordances of a multimedia hypertext were simply required to build the Rossetti Archive; the ability to set text and image in a discoverable interface was made possible by the internet. There is an emerging tension between research-specific computing needs and, as Fyfe puts it, “opening those projects to questions he had yet to imagine” through computing [Fyfe 2011, 1]. The symbiotic relationship between intellectual curiosity and skills-based training in the humanities requires a community of concerns bound by an evolving culture of exploration and experimentation through method. This is a dialogue that should occur between faculty, staff, and students in an ongoing basis during the development and dissemination of in-process scholarly work. In a curricular context, this interdependent relationship between student and instructor means that curricular models aimed at including DH methods may not keep perfect pace with the development of consumer products, technical standards, or open source projects. Providing access to long lasting technical standards and active communities supporting open source technologies that will remain after graduation must be the goal of our training.[4]

Therefore, unlike a more global technical standard, we find that collaborative models must be locally determined and agreed upon by local partners, often in an ad hoc way. Bethany Nowviskie has described the “human factors” of our “scholarly machine” and how, even as we conceive of research in the humanities as operating at a great scale, the collaborations themselves unfold on a closer, human scale: “Despite all the focus on cyberinfrastructure and scholarly workflows, we’re fashioning ever closer, more intimate and personalized systems of production”  [Nowviskie 2012]. The argument for a greater appreciation of the human scale of research and teaching is the basis for an ethics of collaboration and validating digital scholarship. In this context, Nowviskie’s reminder of human scale of research and teaching also highlights a fundamental inconsistency within university structures, for both faculty and students, that are often more interested in statistical metrics of success.

For example, large archival and digitization projects across a range of disciplines have outstripped the constraints of traditional tenure and promotion timelines. Two notable examples of this disjunction between project development and university standards could include The Map of Early Modern London (http://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/), which has been in development for over 10 years, and The Orlando Project (http://www.artsrn.ualberta.ca/orlando/), which has been in development for over 20 years. In “Assessing the Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication”, a report by The Center for Studies in Higher Education, the authors seek to describe the pressures facing faculty in collaborative digitally oriented teams and “to understand the needs and practices of faculty for in-progress scholarly communication”  [Harley et al. 2010, 2]. Due to the increased time and collaboration required to create large scale digital projects and the likelihood that these efforts may grow without being “finished,” scholarly communication that occurs in-progress is indeed becoming more prominent and bucks the traditional view that knowledge is created when a monograph is printed and bound.[5] The report surveys a handful of disciplines–archaeology, astrophysics, biology, economics, history, music, and political science–with a view to understanding the role of technology in collaborative research and in-progress scholarly communication. The core concern for the historians interviewed concerned the “crisis in monographic publication,” which stems from both “cutting back the number of books” published by high quality presses and the “glut of books” produced by low market publishers in an attempt to satiate the “number of books required for advancement at competitive universities”  [Harley et al. 2010, 436]. In all of this, the report recognizes that university libraries, facing squeezed budgets, are incapable of purchasing these monographs, which further deflates demand. In Open Access, Peter Suber has even claimed that the rapid inflation of science based journal subscriptions has caused a knock-on effect in humanities based monograph publishing because university libraries are forced to maintain access to online subscriptions while eroding the physical collection of books housed on campus [Suber 2012, 32]. The answer offered by the authors of the report is in the successful collaborations revolving around “online databases of archival materials or data sets built collaboratively by scholars”  [Harley et al. 2010, 471]. The crisis in scholarly publishing has been well documented in other venues,[6] but the response to these pressures has generated, by necessity, informal collaborations that have placed pressure on students, staff, community partners, and other knowledge stakeholders.

By describing some of the pressures facing researchers, we have begun with a very pragmatic, perhaps pessimistic, view of what David Berry called the “computational turn” across disciplines, wherein “technologies [have shifted] the critical ground of their concepts and theories”  [Berry 2011, 11]. Berry acknowledges that “... with card indexes dying a slow and certain death… there remain few outputs for the non-digital scholar to undertake research in the modern university,” but he extends the consequences of this reality to the need to reimagine pedagogy and the social function of a humanities education. No longer are the humanities tasked with training students for civil participation through a national canon: students, he suggests, “would need to be rethought”  [Berry 2011, 6]. Berry imagines a radical, deeply collaborative recentering that “... would change our understanding of knowledge, wisdom and intelligence itself,” a shift to “... a method of thinking with eyes and screen”  [Berry 2011, 10].

In keeping with Berry’s vision of a “collective intellect” spurred by “... a society or association of actors who can think critically together, mediated through technology,” the academy must rethink both undergraduate and graduate students through the lens of a technologically literate, socially participatory community. By validating digital scholarship throughout the university, all research participants by better conceptualize how pedagogy, labor, and contributorship overlap. Likewise, students must reimagine their relationships and expectations for training, professionalization, and future employment. The social aspect of DH becomes the basis for a community of practice that respects the realities of international, networked, and hybrid identities and cultures. Akin to the communities of practitioners that gather online to support open source projects, DH has the potential to become a community of lifelong learning for our students as participation in the workforce will require near perpetual retraining. We are proposing a third space within the university that is both beyond and between the experiences of teaching and research. Understanding the cultural and social realities of online community formation is a relatively new social function of the humanities, and our collaborative work must similarly engage with these realities that face our students, their employers, and the university itself.

Students require expertise that is adaptable, durable, and authentic. Non-curricular experiences must thereby promote experimentation and open ended play with technology. Skills acquisition should be part of a student’s outlook toward any technical or cultural problem. Humanities students who embrace this sensibility will, however, face an additional set of problems. The heterogeneous nature of collaborative groups in the humanities means that competing values, concerns, and responsibilities can result in tensions and misunderstandings between Primary Investigators and funders, collaborating faculty and staff, graduate and undergraduate students, and knowledge stakeholders and community partners. Sheila Cavanagh observes in her recent article, “Living in a Digital World: Rethinking Peer Review, Collaboration, and Open Access”, that “collaborative work has a different history in the humanities than in the sciences and conventional reward structures in humanistic disciplines do not always easily accommodate mutual efforts”  [Cavanagh 2012]. Similarly, Amy E. Earhart cautions us against “[romanticizing] the lab. Science labs emphasize collaboration, but hierarchies may be apparent”  [Earhart 2015, 393]. Social knowledge creation may include geographically disparate contributors or clusters coming together through social collaboration platforms.[7] The recent work by the digital humanities program at UCLA to standardize student collaborator rights has helped to clarify the ethical imperative for faculty who may be forced by the pressures of tenure and promotion to emphasize scholarly output at the expense of sound pedagogy. Their “Student Collaborators’ Bill of Rights” maintains that “[c]ollaborations between students and more experienced digital humanities practitioners should benefit everyone”  [Di Pressi et al.]. Similarly, the efforts of the Modern Language Association (MLA) gesture toward a bridge between the concerns of faculty with those of students working in a research context. The MLA’s Guidelines for Evaluating Work in Digital Humanities and Digital Media (2012) recognises, for example, that digital scholarly practitioners “engage in collaborative work” far more often than their non-digital counterpart but stops short of recommending specific frameworks of evaluation and peer review. Compounding the difficulties inherent in formally evaluating digital research is the collaborative involvement of teaching faculty, students, graduate researchers, cultural heritage professionals, etc. The difficulties evaluators face is not limited to media type or form–archives, blog posts, databases, and code bases are all up for consideration here–but also encompasses disciplinary norms and shared authorship practices. Through the lens of media and collaboration, we work to discuss and share guidelines that address credit, mentorship frameworks, and scholarly merit for digital work in a responsible way.

Ethically-framed interventions have long been part and parcel of theorized pedagogies. We position bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress as a model for classroom based community formation that negotiates class, race, and gender in an inclusive and productive way [hooks 1994]. Our goal is to extend this kind of “liberated classroom,” as hooks describes it, into the research space and into the public space. Social relationships forged beyond the classroom have guided pedagogies that carry the structural oppressions from society into the classroom and, in our current concerns, collaborative teams. As Brett Hirsch puts it in the introduction to Digital Humanities Pedagogy, “bracketing” teaching away from research is particularly dangerous [Hirsch 2012, 5]. Whether we are thinking about tenure and promotion, course design, research activities, or the critical discussion of pedagogy or experimental design, we risk marginalizing digital humanities by not fully integrating our research practice within our teaching. Perhaps more subtly, we risk transferring the hierarchy between student and instructor by artificially partitioning teaching from research. Paulo Freire remains instructive on this point:

The pedagogy of the oppressed, as a humanist and libertarian pedagogy, has two distinct stages. In the first, the oppressed unveil the world of oppression and through the praxis commit themselves to its transformation. In the second stage, in which the reality of oppression has already been transformed, this pedagogy ceases to belong to the oppressed and becomes a pedagogy of all people in the process of permanent liberation.  [Freire 2005, 55]

We argue that theoretically informed interventions remain the source of digital humanities work, but digital humanities must structure collaborative work to reflect that ethics in a broader pedagogy. The slippage and breadth of collective pronouns is a symptom of this broader problem of credit allocation. As faculty, we must respect and include their behaviors, their view of the world, and their own ethics. As students, we must work to liberate our education from antiquated economic and institutional structures; we must liberate our instructors from paper-based assessment that attempts to fix academic output as a single assignment rather than a dynamic development process; by embracing a collaborative, project based pedagogy, we must reject the simplistic “‘banking’ concept of education” that presumes education is deposited in the heads of students from a teacher [Freire 2005, 72]; we must liberate ourselves from traditional and conservative models of education that are predicated on rarified access to resources and information. The banking concept of education is invalidated by the Open Access model that makes content free. When paired with similar Open Source and Open Data movements, access to open standards and data allows non-traditional scholars to participate like never before. As Freire reminds us, true liberation comes when the oppressors as well as the oppressed are liberated from the structural inequalities that propagate and reward hierarchies of control and dominance. Teaching our students to build digital projects will validate digital scholarship for faculty and staff as well. Crossing between these spaces should not carry with it the hierarchies of the university's own evaluative procedures.

Our ethics is split along the same discursive lines that divides the very term digital humanities. Between the computational tools and the human understanding of culture, there lies a split between the mechanical and the human that animates our collaborative relationships. The UCLA “Student Collaborators’ Bill of Rights” defines the necessity to pay students for their work, arguing that an unpaid internship model should not merely exchange experience or education for labor.[8] Work and education cannot enter into an economics of exchange or gift because the value exchanged is simply too ephemeral, prone to abuse, and reliant on hierarchies of authority between faculty, students, and staff that are symptomatic of the old academy. The UCLA Bill of Rights explains this division with a pragmatic sensibility: “If students have made substantive (i.e., non-mechanical) contributions to the project, their names should appear on the project as collaborators, and they should be acknowledged in subsequent publications that stem from the project”  [Di Pressi et al.]. Student labor and education should not become merely an extension of the computational tools researchers are taking up. Large scale XML/TEI projects may well be the most susceptible research method because of the labor required. The extensibility of the language may become extended uncomfortably into our pedagogy; the structural demands of encoding text re-encodes personal relationships and builds a human ethics through the demands of the machine. Jaron Lanier’s You are Not a Gadget does well to describe how “the most important thing about technology is how it changes people”  [Lanier 2010, 4]. While his argument is dystopian in tone and scope, Lanier rightly argues that people sacrifice some portion of their intellect and their very humanity to serve the limitations of computing. Teachers, as well as students, are susceptible to the extensibility of this ethic. Digital humanities runs the risks of translating the structural logic of the machine onto the human experience of our students. People become the mere workings of the machines now used for analysis and knowledge generation. For this reason, we suggest that contributorship must be modeled on conditions and ethics that are inherited from the humanities.

We must be ready to radically rethink authorship attribution through a more narrative style of contributorship. Models of attribution from other disciplines, in which tacit rules governing order of authorship may privilege the Primary Investigator as the originator of insight, signal the contributions of graduate students or lab directors, or present a simple alphabetized list, do not translate well into digital humanities. Insights offered by constituent partners–who may include undergraduates, graduate research assistants, #altac staff, librarians, computer IT professionals–are essential for the functioning of digital projects for both faculty and institutions. Ideas in a multimedia environment are dependent on layers of software, mentorship, and methodology. The next great insight may come from a unique moment of discovery couched in mentorship, direction, and dialogue. Heterogeneous collaborations within academic contexts help to define the value of publishing digital projects and communicating them to the public.

Scholarly communication is bound up in several competing issues when done collaboratively in a multimedia and multidisciplinary context. Authorship occupies potentially-competing modes of credit and accountability. In recognition of this tension, collaboration allows project contributors with diverse expertise to define their roles and to apportion mutually-beneficial responsibility. There are several models to document and attribute diverse contributions made in a heterogeneous team. TaDiRAH and CrediT are two of the most commonly discussed currently in digital humanities and scholarly communication,[9] though it is unclear just how often these taxonomies are employed (Brand). TaDiRAH cites the Digital Research Infrastructure for Arts and Humanities (DARIAH) and The Digital Research Tools project (DiRT) as employing the framework. Collaboration disrupts existing models of authorship and attribution. Greater transparency is possible with these taxonomies; however, collaborative teams evolve as expertise increases and roles shift as students or faculty come in and out of the project. Activity definitions, like those used by TaDiRAH represent just one side of the story that includes contributor narrative statements and historical perspectives of the evolution of roles as the overlap and shift over time. The humanities-specific logic of history and narrative come to define our model.

As we discussed at the opening, our perspective emerged during our participation in the Mellon-funded Scholarly Communication Institute (SCI) hosted by the Research Triangle of North Carolina from the 11th to the 15th of October, 2015. Our discussions during this week centered on digital humanities work as a community of practice, wherein the community is formed by the very methods and techniques employed. TaDIRAH includes “community_building” and “teaching_and_learning” in the taxonomy of activities, but these roles do not map easily to student participation and define what constitutes these acts. During the week at SCI, we were engaged on multiple levels of community building and teaching and learning, but these activities were difficult to capture in the current taxonomies. We turned to building a timeline with Timeline.js to show how our thought evolved. We built a project site to capture our collaboratively written white paper, which used Google Docs to shape our team’s discussions. We strove to have our project site reflect the fluidity of born digital content, which evinces different issues related to credit, to valuing varied contributions, and the articulation of participation in our thinking. The romantic ideal of the solitary genius and the writer in his garret was transparent to us as we worked in a multimedia environment, rapidly picking up tasks, and sharing information. The taxonomies of contributorship faded as we grappled with collecting our conversation. The timeline of our thinking includes tweets from group members and digital photographs of our activity, many of which were taken by Eric Dye. We argue for a radical inclusiveness that recognises the very real labor of contributors that may manifest in a variety of ways. This is a model of digital scholarship that is interested in the big picture of academia intersecting with the public and of pedagogy existing as research. Knowledge is a networked thing, and conceiving of scholarship as an inherently collaborative venture enriches the people and the products of any given field. Having begun in-depth discussion of theoretical issues, we realised that our key insights to discussions of how to evaluate digital work emerged from extensive practical knowledge. To expand on those insights, we developed a number of project-based case studies that highlighted the collaboration behind them. These case studies might serve as models for further study to gain information on more widespread practices in digital scholarship.

With a desire to identify universal bridges between disciplines, we turned to narrative case studies about four projects that involved our team members in a range of capacities, including as facilitator, project manager, principal investigator, and student collaborator. These case studies work from the understanding that a granular approach to contribution, as would be captured in a metric that simply counted GitHub commits, would not appreciate the contributions of individuals who may have provided a critical insight or discovery that shaped the evolution of our projects. We found that historical accounting of activities helped lay bare the methodological decisions of each group as they evolved. Our realization in our heterogeneous group was that there are layers of dependences between technology and expertise that foregrounds students, staff, and faculty roles in a highly variable way. We found that a mentorship model that flattened hierarchies between participants allowed for a fuller sense of participation and a holistic representation of the insights offered by any one individual.

In large part, the challenges to new systems of evaluation and credit are not technological or infrastructural per se. Instead, they are social, habituated by longstanding disciplinary norms and expectations. They are deeply embedded in administrative norms and processes, from informal expectations to the literal paperwork used within universities. They find expression in tenure and promotion guidelines or traditions that ignore or disincentivize collaborative work and processes, frame digital scholarship as service, or overemphasize the “final product” of digital scholarship. In evaluation frameworks like the Research Excellence Framework in the United Kingdom or the Excellence in Research for Australia, we can observe the nationalization of these standards in an attempt to repatriate scholarship into the limited roles of training a citizenry, which continue to overvalue monographs in rigid point-based systems that determine funding. We see these disciplinary norms in requirements for depositing dissertations as PDFs that often preclude digital work outside that limiting file format. The habits of student evaluation and curriculum development further disincentivize faculty from engaging their students in collaborative teams and training undergraduates and graduates to complete digital projects. Students see faculty trumpeting the arrival of their new book and using it as a calling card for their expertise, while eliding the pressures of tenure and promotion. Finally, students run the risk of emulating these worn out modes of scholarly communication and sacrificing their education to repeat the cycle.

Through our case studies, we hope to narrativize how a project's processes, participation patterns, and outcomes can cast these formally and informally institutionalized values in relief. At its core, the approach is humanistic: we tell the stories of our projects in an attempt to glimpse the connectedness that holds true collaboration and ethical distribution of credit as a core value. Our case studies bring to light our attempts at flattened hierarchies and, within such a two-dimensional model, the sites of overlapping knowledge and abilities that are sewn together into the fabric of our projects. To return to Ratto’s terminology, our approach embraces its “seamfulness” [Ratto 2007]. The seamlessness of contemporary consumer electronics contains a rhetoric that elides the process of development, which we argue is the key moment when new knowledge and insights are created. By embracing the collaborative development as a core concern for digital humanities pedagogy and research, we reject the consumerist privileging of a final product and embrace an evolving model of social knowledge creation. As a development ethos guiding projects, Chalmers and Galani describe an approach to interface that “involves deliberately revealing seams to users, and taking advantage of features usually considered as negative or problematic”  [Chalmers and Galani 2004, 1]. For our purposes, the seam is not a failure but a redoubling that results from layered, overlapping systems; our seams strengthen rather than weaken interpersonal signals. Nevertheless, the seams are sites of contestation in both Chalmers’s formulation and our adaptation thereof: in both instances, the seam troubles the system and are “negative or problematic.” Ratto pushes the logic of seamfulness into an ethical domain by highlighting how consumers of seamless electronics become “passive agents”  [Ratto 2007, 24], who are unable to modify or repair the technology they purchase. The ethics of seamlessness is an ethic of disempowerment. When we elide the seams between teaching and research, our students become passive agents and mere consumers of education. Giving them the awareness of the seams between teaching and research allows them to take agency of their education.

As we think through the utility seamful design, there is a danger in adopting tantalizingly figurative formulations: “Seamfully integrated tools would maintain the unique characteristics of each tool, through transformations that retained their individual characteristics”  [Chalmers and Galani 2004, 2]. While we certainly want to celebrate our “unique characteristics,” the metaphor implies a problematic association between the computational tools and those who use them. We want to continue to push against that gadgetization of human contributorship that Lanier laments and adapt a model that lays bare human networks of overlapping agency, displaying the joints where our projects become knit together. Dean Rehberger, the Director of Matrix at Michigan State University, has helpfully defined Digital Humanities as quilting [Rehberger 2014].[10] Perhaps, if we stretch the needlecraft metaphor even further, we might think of it instead as a motley patchwork of projects that comprise the canvas for our big tent view of DH. We can strengthen that fabric with intentional, ethically designed knowledge networks that, when viewed through a humanistic lens, get us closer (as a large community of practice) to evaluative structures that allow for responsible, care-full accreditation and that foster intentional growth rather than sprawl.