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December 19, 2007, 04:04 PM ET
Can Humanities Scholars Collaborate?
Most people, including most university administrators, think that humanities scholars are necessarily, inevitably, loners -– that they work in splendid isolation. They require for support only good libraries, paper for taking notes (well, low-end computers and good access to the Internet) and perhaps some modest research travel funds. Humanists, we are told, work slowly as well as in isolation. They publish in low circulation journals or poorly disseminated books, and do not share much of their work prior to publication.
This stereotype is in comparison to natural scientists (or even social scientists), who are not very dependent upon books and serials, require expensive computing equipment and support, work in groups, and live in a preprint communication world, in which the final form of scholarly communication has mainly an archival function.
Both stereotypes are to a considerable extent reflective of reality, but the humanities version points to areas of genuine concern for anyone who thinks, as I do, that our scholarly practices need to change if we are to take advantage of emerging intellectual opportunities, mostly interdisciplinary, and the potential of enhanced scholarly collaboration and the incredible technological opportunities now available to us.
There are a great many things I could say in favor of modernizing the practices of humanities scholarship, but today I simply want to call attention to the development noted in The Chronicle last week on the remarkable collaboration between the late Roy Rosenzweig’s George Mason University Center for History and New Media (now led by Dan Cohen) and the Internet Archive. The CHNM has developed superb (free and downloadable) software called Zotero to enable scholars to organize their notes, bibliography, online articles, and Internet links so that they are easily searchable and retrievable. This in itself can help to revolutionize the way scholars work. But the additional enhancement is an arrangement with the Internet Archive is to post some or all of this work so that it can be available to other scholars.
For secretive individualists, which is to say old-fashioned humanists, this will sound like an invasion of privacy and an invitation to plagiarism. But to scholars who value accessibility, collaboration, and the early exchange of information and insight -– the future is available. And free on the Internet.
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