Can CERN serve as a model for Digital Humanities?

Nowadays CERN is perhaps the most recognized model of multinational collaboration in research. Created in 1954, it has given the international community some of the most fundamental insights into the essence of matter; and it has returned the investment in innumerable advances in technology. Its Large Hadron Collider is the world’s largest particle accelerator; this is where the Higgs boson has been observed; and this is also where the Web was born to revolutionise the way we all communicate, as the DH community knows probably better than anyone.
CERN’s success has always been attributed to its being a joint venture of an increasing number of nations. While it enjoys a stable status thanks to agreements between politicians, it would not have been possible without its visionaries; their vision extends from pure research to how people from all over the world and from a number of disciplines can work together and all contribute to that success.
Digital Humanities is equally and increasingly an international venture, as is evidenced, for one, by the map of past, present and future DH conferences. Here, too, people from all over the world, from various nations and ethnic groups, from very many scholarly disciplines want to work together. The lessons we have learned at CERN can help the DH community in terms of institutional organization and, more importantly, in the general approach to multinational and diverse scholarly collaboration.