International digital humanities projects that digitize, analyze, and make accessible collections of historical letters create abundant opportunities for reframing knowledge in a wide variety of fields. These ‘ephemera’ shed light on the daily experiences of individuals while also offering a historical portrait of knowledge formation that continues to shape our world today. Yet understanding the histories and the networks that generated these collections of correspondence requires grappling with multidimensional, dynamic connections across institutional, disciplinary, and international borders that historically have defined scholarly fields of study. For example, difficult paleography, unstandardized spelling, and multi-lingual sources create specific challenges that require close collaboration between content experts with different skills from multiple disciplines. To uncover and trace the complex networks of the past, digital humanists increasingly seek multi-layered collaborations.
Griffin and Hayler maintain that, while collaboration happens frequently in digital humanities projects, it is often taken for granted and remains under theorized. To “resist the silencing” they see occurring in the field, participants must “recognize that no collaborator can ever be neutral” and that all participants’ “roles must be understood as well as possible before, during, and after the event.” (Griffin and Hayler 2018: paragraph 64). Digital projects that center historical correspondence require collaboration in at least three interleaved layers. First, they include institutional alliances between universities and repositories that bring together researchers who can marshal dispersed resources into a shared analytical framework. Projects that extend across national borders require international cooperation that raises specific challenges and opens new opportunities. Second, they require intra- and extra- disciplinary teamwork to integrate project goals and outcomes into a wide range of archival initiatives, scholarly research projects, pedagogical programs, and crowdsourcing platforms. Communicating and collaborating across disciplines broadens the possibilities for creating new knowledge. By clarifying the roles of all involved and understanding what each discipline offers, complex projects provide opportunities for creative problem solving. Finally, digital projects centering historical correspondence depend upon effective coordination of technical requirements and subject matter expertise and interests. For such projects to succeed, scholars, technologists, project managers, and citizen scholars must work effectively together to implement the digitization, analysis, and public presentation of the correspondence.
This panel will feature the multilayered collaborations involved in three recent and ongoing digital humanities project: PRINT (People, Religion, Information Networks, and Travel – Migration in the Early Modern World), TRANSCORRES (Transatlantic Correspondence), and Plant Letters (Cartas de Natureza). Each presentation addresses the challenges and opportunities of collaboration in different ways.
PRINT - People, Religion, Information Networks, and Travel - is a collaborative initiative that traces the communication networks of early modern European religious minorities (Anabaptists, Quaker, and Pietists) and explores how they shaped migration patterns in the early modern Atlantic world. Through their support of fellow believers in need and their missionary work, religious dissenters enabled travel, migration, and the flow of knowledge and information. PRINT is creating a portal to collections of manuscript letters from 1630 to 1730 located in five repositories (Historical Society of Pennsylvania; Library of the Society of Friends, London; Stadsarchief Amsterdam; Franckesche Stiftungen, Halle; and Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin), spanning four countries, and three languages – English, Dutch and German. To do so, the PRINT team is collaborating with archivists, librarians, students, and citizen scholars to transcribe and translate correspondence, create customized metadata, generate robust linked open data, and build an automated metadata pipeline. Our goal is to visualize and make accessible the connections between early modern correspondents, show how people and information moved across space, and demonstrate how their networks changed over time. In this paper, Rosalind Beiler, co-director of the team, will discuss the challenges and opportunities of collaborating across institutions with different national cataloguing standards, creating an international community of citizen scholars, and building a database that facilitates granular network analysis to capture the mobility of people and knowledge.
TRANSCORRES - Transatlantic Correspondence is a collaborative initiative that aims to build a digital historical archive that enables a relational research perspective on transatlantic spaces of mobility and knowledge. It investigates the interwoven everyday worlds, knowledge orders, and cultures of communication of migrants by examining mobile and stable horizons of experience, along with the reciprocal influence between them, from an actor-centered, long-term perspective. This new research perspective for mobility and migration history requires the development of a digital infrastructure consisting of a relationally structured digital corpus of transatlantic correspondence. TRANSCORRES will bring together hitherto separate or even unknown collections of private correspondence from German immigrants in the United States and their friends and families who stayed at home. The so-called “homeland letters” – letters written back home from the United States to Germany – have been collected in Germany and are so far available as a digitized facsimile collection ( Deutsche Auswandererbriefsammlung). “America Letters” – letters written to the United States by friends and families who stayed at home – are located in many small local archives and private collections distributed all over the United States. The German Historical Institute Washington has identified these letters and has started to digitize and transcribe them (www.migrantconnections.org). Both cases require collaboration with private collectors, local history societies, libraries and archives, and citizen scholars. Ursula Lehmkuhl, director of the Deutsche Auswandererbriefsammlung, will discuss the opportunities and challenges of collaborating with private archivists, family historians, citizen scholars, and librarians in a transatlantic research setting.
Many botanic gardens are historical institutions holding centuries of invaluable archival records of their scientific and daily activities. We launched “Plant Letters,” a participatory science project on Zooniverse, to make accessible the historical information produced by the Institute, Herbarium and Botanic Garden of the University of Coimbra (1870-1928). We invited voluntary citizens from around the world to transcribe the Institute’s documents associated with the production of botanical knowledge. From these handwritten records, it is possible to extract an important set of natural historical data. In the first phase of the project, we made available ca. 1200 documents, mostly in Portuguese, English, and French. For over a year, ca. 1250 volunteers participated in transcribing a total of 3,809,000 characters – over 641,000 words (more than the King James Bible). Data obtained with citizens’ collaboration is now accessible at “Plant Letters.” The letters’ searchable content allows us to access historical records about: plant species distribution; plant material circulation; scientific processes of plant classification; the contexts of living collections in the botanical garden, herbarium specimens, and museum objects in the university natural history holdings; and international networks of botanical knowledge production. These biodiversity records pertain to flora not only in Portugal but also in its former colonies in Africa, who as independent countries require this valuable data. We will analyze the advantages and challenges of collaborative transcription in archives, how to engage citizens in active participation, and strategies for open access dissemination of community-produced data that is valuable for present and future biodiversity conservation .