Blog Post 5: Jessie Cohen

I am of two minds when it comes to collaboration and academia. As a student I always dread group projects, but as a future instructor I understand, at least theoretically, the rewards of collaborative learning. Needless to say, I was skeptical about what I would find in Lisa Spiro’s blog post Examples of Collaborative Digital Humanities. Like Michelle, I find working collaboratively on a single piece of writing difficult and frustrating. So although Spiro began with a critique on the dearth of co-authorship in the humanities, I was happy that she did not limit her discussion of collaboration to that critique. Spiro emphasizes, in fact, that she “interpret[s] the word ‘collaboration’ broadly; it’s a squishy term with synonyms such as teamwork, cooperation, partnership, and working together.” With this in mind, I found the Souda Online project to be the best example of how the digital humanities can incorporate collaborative scholarship to overcome “the limits of our own knowledge.” The Souda Online project, also known as SOL, brings scholars together from all over the world to help translate a 10^th century Byzantine Greek encyclopedia known as “The Souda” into English. According to the project’s website, over 170 scholars from eighteen countries and four continents have contributed their expertise and research. Aside from making large-scale projects more manageable, collaborative endeavors such as the SOL also prevent history from being a single narrative colonized by one voice claiming superlative authority. Ultimately, Spiro’s blog post helped me see practically rather than just theoretically how collaborative digital humanities helps redefine scholars as democratic “co-creator[s] of knowledge” rather than its tyrants.