Transatlantic Collaboration in Digital Humanities The Global Georgians

Collaboration is fundamental to digital humanities work and DH researchers and practitioners spend significant effort, time and resources on collaborative processes. Additionally collaboration is frequently necessary and actively encouraged by funders (AHRC, 2019; NEH-DHAG, 2019) and yet little formal discourse and attention is given to this topic in DH publications and project reports  (Griffin and Hayler, 2018; Lawrence, 2006). In an attempt to address this lack of dialogue, this short paper introduces a project that aims to map and document the collaboration of multiple diverse partners, in a large-scale distributed digital humanities project.  
The Georgian Papers Programme (the Programme) is a ten-year interdisciplinary, transatlantic project to digitize, conserve, catalogue, transcribe, interpret, and disseminate 65,000 manuscript items from the British Royal Archives and Royal Library relating to the Georgian period and its monarchs, 1714-1837.  The corpus contains letters, diaries, account books, inventories, household records and more. The Programme is a partnership between the Royal Collection Trust and King’s College London and is joined by primary United States partners the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture and William & Mary Libraries.  It is a collaborative enterprise in almost all facets. This is by design and on occasion, especially with regards to the cataloguing, metadata enhancement and data exchange, by necessity. The whole process is very much a learning curve for all parties concerned and significant teamwork and cooperation is absolutely key.   
Project & framework
The Programme is a distributed project which involves partners in the areas of archivists, librarians, academics/researchers in a variety of disciplines, and research software engineers.  Partners are responsible for development of specific areas and products that ultimately are expected to be integrated into the wider Programme ecosystem. King’s Digital Lab (KDL) and William & Mary Libraries (W&M), both technical partners, each lead the development and production of core portions of the ecosystem: KDL is producing a digital collaborative workspace and enhancing metadata; W&M is responsible for full-text transcription.  KDL and W&M teams work independently but rely on digitized archival materials from the Royal Archives and on the academic and scholarly community that is being built around the Programme. Coordination among the partners, and support from colleagues outside of the Programme on development, standards, data exchange, timelines, and product delivery is a continuous process.
The leads for transcription at W&M, and at KDL for metadata and documentation have set about to study and capture the Programme’s collaboration activities and efforts.  The study began in the first half of 2019, and is scheduled to continue for the life of the Programme. We are using a mixed methods research approach, that includes an online survey and a number of video interviews asking our Programme partners to reflect upon each year of their Programme work.  Online survey questions are based partially on the IDEA Partnership Success Rating Scale (IDEA, 2006), with questions specifically about communication tools and digital humanities added. The interview questions are derived from the INKE e-research collaboration study (Siemens and INKE, 2012), and tailored to this project.  Analysis of the data is conducted using grounded theory methodology.
The study focuses on collaboration in two areas:
1) Group to group
Exchange amongst digital projects and research groups is commonplace for DH practitioners.  Not always intentional, the interaction with a fellow DH group easily becomes lost over the course of a large project, and in a field that often requires interdisciplinary teamwork and expertise, capturing this aspect of collaboration is vital for documenting the evolution of DH work, and building on a record of impact, alongside more traditional ‘records’ such as reference citations.
Using information visualization techniques, we map groups and projects that we consider, are influenced by, and actively engage with Programme collaborative workspace development, metadata enhancement and transcription work.  A timeline illustrates the time frames of each collaboration, and the mapped collaborations are categorized based on the level of impact, if any, the group has on the development and processes of our Programme work. Transkribus, a Handwritten Text Recognition tool developed as part of the Recognition and Enrichment of Archival Documents Project (READ), is one example of a DH project that is an essential tool for the Programme and consequently has a large impact in terms of its direct contribution of full-text transcriptions to the collaborative workspace.
2) Human to human
The human coordination in DH work, especially on large distributed projects, can be the most stressful and rewarding part of the project.  Dialogue on human to human collaboration (Griffin and Hayler, 2018) in DH projects often happens in informal conversations, is reflective and more about the challenges of the work as much as it is directly about what steps to take next (Siemens and INKE, 2012). This research also aims to capture and chart the human relationships side of collaboration.
Conclusion
Our presentation will present the visual mapping of group to group collaboration from the initial two years of the Programme, and report on the human to human reflection work.  Through analyzing and mapping collaborative activities in a transatlantic collaboration, we believe this work will contribute significantly to the discussion on the topic of documentation of collaboration in the Digital Humanities.

Bibliography

Digital Humanities Advancement Grants
(2019)
.
 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) https://www.neh.gov/grants/odh/digital-humanities-advancement-grants (accessed 23 April 2019).

Funding - Arts and Humanities Research Council
(2019)
.
 Funding, https://ahrc.ukri.org/funding/ (accessed 23 April 2019).

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