Interdisciplinary scholarly collaboration in data-intensive, public-funded, international digital humanities project work

摘要

The information practices of collaborative interdisciplinary researchers, especially in distributed environments, remain understudied. Embracing the naturalistic paradigm, this qualitative case study relies upon semi-structured interviews, snowball sampling, and grounded analysis. Based on interviews with 53 participants from 11 Digging Into Data 3 (DID3, 2014-2016) projects, this study examines the working practices of scholars (library and information science professionals, humanists, and computer scientists) engaging in collaborative, international, data-intensive, publicly-funded interdisciplinary research. Benefits of such work include avoiding redundancy, exploding disciplinary silos, and more ambitious, larger-scale outputs. Challenges and lessons learned center on innovation, flexibility, and failure, translation, intermediaries, divisions of labor and delegation of responsibilities and tasks, conflict resolution, technology, outputs and publication, and timeframe, sustainability, and infrastructure.