Tag Archives: Collaboration

Collaborative Opportunities

The Travelogue team has been exploring how other sites are using maps as digital pedagogical tools.  We are also connecting with possible collaborators, including other mapping projects, educational institutions and libraries.

In an effort to be participate in the conversations happening on social network platforms, Travelogue has been monitoring how Twitter is being used by similar projects.  We have explored hashtags that are being used in reference to maps, are concerned with literature, teaching, English, History, Social Studies, high school teachers, lesson plans etc.  We have also been following the conversations/posts on the Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory (HASTAC) site.

On the development front we are playing with several WordPress Child Themes to see which will best work for the Travelogue site and the ESRI Storymap we will be using.  Research wise, we have completed a workable draft of the Ernest Hemingway content spreadsheet which we will use to construct Travelogue’s Ernest Hemingway StoryMap.

The Travelogue Commons site has a Research section that is categorized and features helpul resources, compiled during the progression of the Travelogue project.  For example, Esri Storymaps for Education.

Thank you for following our journey.  We look forward to sharing our connections with others in the GIS world.

If you want to contact us please do. Our project blog is at  travelogue.commons.gc.cuny.edu. Email us at dhtravelogue [at] gmail [dot] com or follow us on Twitter @DhTravelogue

One Prof One Book?

I enjoyed Tom Schienfeldt’s presentation on his One Week One Tool initiative. One thing in particular has stuck with me. After his talk, the question of Project Management as applied to academia came up. Mr. Schienfeldt made the point that corralling humanists into working together is difficult. It’s really a shame this is true.

People can do so much more when they work in a team possessed of complementary skills, and this applies to academic pursuits in the Humanities as well as any others. It’s often said at this point that successful collaboration happens all the time in the sciences. What is so different about the humanistic fields that makes collaboration so hard?

Many say it is because a monograph, apparently the great proof of academic accomplishment, succeeds best as a solo undertaking. It’s the concentrated expression of a single person’s study and thought. Why is this valued? Partially because the subjects of the Humanities are thought of as subjective, or at least contingent. The monograph form also evolved partially as a response to the need to recognize academic accomplishments, designed to make it possible to give credit to one person.

But, the monograph isn’t the inherent form of humanistic expression. Group projects, while they look different from monographs, can still provide unique contributions to knowledge. They might take the form of an archive, or a ‘social edition’, or any number of arrangements not invented yet. And, if expectations change in order to recognize group work, some academics will consider it in their best interests to work together.

Even the monograph form doesn’t exclude group work. It is possible to assign appropriate credit for each author’s contribution to a multi-author monograph, eg, by assigning authors to write individual chapters. Imagine, however, a book written truly collaboratively, with each author’s text intermingling with the others’. Authors could use a version control system like Git, letting them work simultaneously on the same text without interfering with each other’s progress–and allowing judges to assign credit, using Git’s Diff function to see who wrote what.

By the way, I’ve employed just such a collaborative model using Git & Github (see the source code here), working with Alevtina Verbovetskaya, Robin Davis, and Junior Tidal, for a presentation we are making on the topic Life with Pi: Microcomputing in Academia to the CUNY IT Conference this next Friday, December 6th. Come on by if you’re interested!

“Twitter and Blogs are first drafts of scholarship…”

Borrowing that line from samplereality’s Tweet, the writer Mark Sample was correcting a statement after realizing the project George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media and Tom Scheinfeldt was launching, Anthologize, planned to give ‘better binding’ to such scholarly works. As we have learned however, the One Week | One Tool project has done more than just provide an application for “publicizing” blogs and mapping texts with possibly related and funky imagery. Analyzing collaboration within a new realm of scholarship is the real gift of the seven day, twelve person project.

However, as was said by Ms. Stevens earlier, the One Week… project was an experiment in highly irregular circumstances. Time is an issue which obviously will present itself in any situation. Gioia is correct though: The focus should not be on “crash programs” strategy and management. Any group forming a consensus will run into problems of disagreement and the question of internal leadership may or may not also rise. But with regards to DH, how could people facing ordinary constraints (time, money, jobs, families, multiple competing projects, laundry etc.), complete projects with greater efficiency.

Unfortunately, I am unsure what more can really be added from the previous post.

Collaboration and creative constraints

The One Week | One Tool project shows that time and resource constraints really can be made to work in a project’s favor. Twelve strangers who committed to seven days of all hack, no yack, and very little sleep made some great tools (Serendip-o-matic, Anthologize). Creating severe constraints can foster both collaboration and creativity.  Tom Scheinfeldt pointed out three key lessons for successful collaborations: 1) embrace serendipity 2) let go and 3) collaboration is shared doing.

DH barn raising projects are inspiring, but they are artificial laboratories of collaboration. How many of the lessons will be useful outside of an intense, boot camp style workshop? I agree that collaboration is shared doing, but I started to wonder when Scheinfeldt pointed out that time constraints can mean sacrificing shared decision making.  My workplace culture focuses on consensus building, so I found it both slightly shocking and secretly delightful (those staff meetings are long!) when Scheinfeldt said “Moving on will mend hurt feelings more than talking about it.”

What about collaboration for the rest of us? Very few people have the luxury of attending a week long workshop. The real world has plenty of constraints (time, money, jobs, families, multiple competing projects, laundry etc.). What are best ways to use these constraints to promote collaboration and creativity? Maybe it’s less about crash programs and more about intelligent adaptation to existing conditions? Starting a business (designing the right product for the right market) or gardening (choosing the best plant to thrive in a particular location) could be useful examples for thinking about the best ways to use what we have to build something together.