0.11 Roundtable discussion  (Page 3/5)

Patel : Science is very much a collaborative enterprise. We almost always work with a team, but not typically a team that spans the kinds of boundaries that are represented here at “Emerging Disciplines.” Teams are typically comprised of other specialists more or less within a discipline. Are there research questions that would draw people from our group today to work together? Problems are typically intransigent and often cross disciplinary boundaries. Not only do we need to find a problem that will excite people from diverse backgrounds and make them feel that they have something to contribute, we also need to create structures and reward systems that allow that to happen. There are definitely incentive systems for staying in your lane. Events like this reward people from diverse fields for getting out of their lanes.

Audience : Many collaborations in the humanities don’t result in anything on a graduate student’s CV other than acknowledgements in the beginnings of our books. A recent essay in PMLA suggested web publication as a way for graduate students to collaborate, but it is important to recognize that social and institutional circumstances matter. A graduate student’s on-line work is not going to get as much commentary and collaborative interaction as Caroline Levander’s would. We have to teach the ethics of collaboration as well. Many of your comments about one another’s work have suggested that this is very much on your minds. What does it mean to do scientific work in history, or to think about the visual humanities in relation to literary studies, against which it stands in ambiguous relation?

Sheingorn : I find collaborative work to be the most stimulating. I have always worked with someone who shares an interest in a question and brings something to it that I can’t bring. In my case, we’re not two art historians looking at a manuscript, but an art historian and someone from French, English, or history. I find that process synergizing from the moment you bring up the question on through the writing, which is also collaborative. But many of my collaborations are not rewarded within certain institutional structures. I tell my students not to think of such collaborations until they have tenure, but I will have them do a collaborative project, hoping that the experience will plant a seed that will pop up when they get tenure. We shouldn’t give up on collaborative work because book prizes go to single-author books or because getting two grants the same year to work on a project is hard.

Presner : Institutional structures that reward single, isolated achievements continue to reign. Nevertheless, there are often clear rubrics in place for dissecting who did what on a project. In a way, this process can be odd, because often projects are synergistic, and the design of the interface, for example, cannot be dissociated from the content. Yet if it can be reduced to something scalable and numerical, collaboration can be adequately rewarded in promotion. It’s key to figure out how to open up spaces for unanticipated or unexpected participation, whether it concerns the ways in which new communities are engaged in contributing, producing, or gathering knowledge, or how this information becomes respected by the scholarly community, perhaps in a way that it hadn’t been before.