Collaboration as Revolution

A solitary monk sits in candelight and silence, quill in one hand, scraping knife in the other. He labors to cover parchment with ink. His exhausting work continues for many days until the manuscript is complete. This image of the solitary scholar, working for a small audience on obscure texts, is sadly the one we often recreate in our own work. But, the scribe’s work depended upon the parchment-maker, the auctoritas he copied, the illuminator, the binder, and others. The production of a manuscript was already collaborative, even if we imagine the figure we most emulate to be solitary.

Collaboration is one of the concepts frequently discussed among those in the humanities and those studying social networking. How do we facilitate it? What tools make it effective? What cognitive models should we use? How can the drive for it inform pedagogy? These and many other questions we explore on a regular basis with the assumption that collaboration is likely to create new, useful knowledge, is a necessary skill for our students to learn, and is probably the direction toward which current technological tools are driving us, so we need to understand it. Nevertheless, one place where collaboration is rarely, if ever seen, is in the conventional research done by humanities scholars.

We might study collaboration in great depth, but the result of that study will often be a scene that remains all-too-familiar: sitting alone, in front of a computer, composing an article. Writing, it seems, is an almost inherently solitary process. In essence, when writing, we cloister ourselves, try to shut out all distractions, and focus on synthesizing the research (I even go so far as to disable my Internet connection, a sign of my feeble will power in the face of the social web). I’m not sure there’s an effective way around the need for solitude, though. Is it possible to write collaboratively? That is, to write with someone else, in the same physical place?

Possibly. Programmers have a technique called “pair programming,” in which two people sit before a single computer. The driver types in the code while the observer (also called the navigator) reviews what the driver types. They’ll often switch places after a predefined time. This model allows the driver to focus on the local, specific issues (how do I open this file, parse this document, etc.?) while the observer can both catch errors as the occur while thinking about the global, strategic issues of the program. I’ve seen some references to pair-writing, which seems to follow this model coders sometimes now use, but it does not seem to be well known or employed.

One of the biggest obstacles to pair writing, of course, is that much of the work humanities scholars do is, as I mentioned, so solitary. Even as I write this blog post, I do so alone, as I suspect do almost all the other HASTAC scholars and other contributors to this site. Further, the process of generating a journal article, a book, a dissertation, or other similar documents requires a significant amount of reading and reflection, things that usually take place in a single head at a time. I do not, however, think this solitude is a bad thing, even if I grant that collaboration needs to assume a more prominent role in our work (itself an assumption I’m leaving unexamined here). There is, also, the issue of style. The goal of a programmer is to create something that works; the style of the code is relatively set, even though there are multiple ways to achieve the same ends. Writing, on the other hand, is an attempt to communicate with an audience and represents a version of the author’s voice. To blend multiple voices in harmony is a difficult exercise.

Where, then, can collaboration profitably enter the process? Can we graft it on to existing methods of research or do we need to consider how valuing collaboration can itself shift our goals and concerns? Just as we can look to computer science for one potential writing practice, we can (and many would argue should) consider the model provided by the sciences more generally. There, collaboration thrives. Most papers have multiple authors because scientific research regularly demands a team for its completion. The ease of collaboration, then, comes from the types of research pursued; it’s far easier to work with others on quantitative analysis that demands the gathering of data, performing experiments, and similar work, than it is for qualitative analysis like, for example, the interpretation of a literary text through a particular theoretical framework.

There is, however, a small but growing contingent of scholars calling for a more scientific approach to literary studies, including a turn to quantitative analysis, in one manifestation what Franco Moretti terms “distant reading”. Jonathan Gottschall, in Literature, Science, and a New Humanities argues that without adapting the scientific method to literary studies, the slide into irrelevance and neglect by the larger public will only accelerate. While I don’t wish to go into these types of arguments here, I do want to emphasize that our (read: HASTACers, digital humanists, et al.) desire to see new ways of collaboration brought to a traditionally solitary field demands not only new ways of working together, but new questions and new methodologies that make such collaboration feasible and effective. This ramification is not often mentioned. Like the recent turn to cognitive studies, what seems on the surface like just another way of going about the old work in fact promises to overturn some of the most fundamental assumptions of our fields. It promises to usher in a more scientific literary studies than might be comfortable for many. If we really want to collaborate we must change our questions so that it is possible. Those types of questions, however, are not those we’re trained to ask. Thus, collaboration of humanities scholars requires a shift to quantitative analysis and other, more scientific methods. It requires a revolution.