MLA Session: Developing and Sustaining Collaborative Research in the Humanities

26 Jul 2015

Panelists share examples of four collaborative projects involving research by a team of two or more scholars from literary studies and computer science or other disciplines. Discussion focuses on best practices, lessons learned, communication strategies, what challenges to anticipate, and methods, tools, and outcomes.

Friday, January 8 at 5:15–6:30 p.m.

Presiding: Brian Rosenblum, Univ. of Kansas Libraries

Speakers:
Sayan Bhattacharyya, Univ. of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Katharine Coles, University of Utah
Patricia Fumerton, University of California, Santa Barbara
Lauren Klein, Georgia Institute of Technology
Miriah Meyer, University of Utah
Muhammad Saad Shamin, Baylor College of Medicine
Carl Stahmer, University of California, Davis

The four projects, all NEH-funded collaborations, are described briefly below:

• TOME: Short for Interactive TOpic Model and MEtadata Visualization, TOME is a tool designed to support the exploratory thematic analysis of digitized archival collections. Collaboratively authored by a computer scientist and a literary scholar, it generates visualizations designed to allow scholars to trace the evolution and circulation of themes across social networks and over time. Resting on an archive of nineteenth-century abolitionist newspapers, the PIs are able to employ their tool to ask questions about authorship, influence, and audience. The PI’s collaboratively conceived of the computational technique of topic modeling as a process of thematic exploration. Their work was motivated by the implications of their successes and failures for the fields of both nineteenth-century scholarship and text visualization. (Panelist: Laren Klein.)

• Poemage: A collaboration between poets, literary scholars and computer scientists specializing in visualization and simulation, the Poemage project aims to develop a tool to visualize the “poem space” of a poem—not only the shape of the poem on the page and its internal actions and relationships, but also how the poem sounds, as well as its engagements with the reader. The collaborative process forced the project teams to rethink how they understood poetry, determine what data was valuable to each group, consider how to balance long-term and short-term goals, and imagine how the project might generate new insights in both literary studies and computer science. (Panelists: Katharine Coles & Miriah Meyer.)

• EBBA: The English Broadside Ballad Archive brings together a team of experts in the fields of English literature, digital programming, and ethnographic music, to make broadside ballads of the seventeenth century fully accessible as texts, art, music, and cultural records. The project is intensely collaborative, and advances through a process of constantly meeting, arguing, and group thinking. Team leaders from every key aspect of the project meet weekly to address problems as a team—where everyone is confident that they can speak freely and that their ideas will be heard and often implemented, even at the cost of redoing aspects of the project—and the team leaders mentor or apprentice students and those newer to the project in an ongoing regenerative chain-of-being (working both up and down) of collaborative expertise. (Panelists: Patricia Fumerton and Carl G. Stahmer.)

• HathiTrust+Bookworm: The HT+BW project is a large-scale, multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional endeavor involving collaborators from the fields of literature, librarianship, education, culturomics, computer science, and applied mathematics. It combines an interest in humanistic research based on texts and their interpretation with the possibility of scientific and statistical analyses of corpora. This presentation will discuss the dynamics of this collaboration, including the emphasis on finding shared values to move the collaboration forward. (Panelists: Sayan Bhattacharyya and Muhammad Saad Shamim.)