Boundary practices of digital humanities collaborations

One of the defining characteristics of digital humanities is the emphasis on interdisciplinary collaboration. To coordinate across disciplinary boundaries, the development of common ground is necessary to negotiate goals and practices. Yet how such common ground can be established, and whether adoption of interdisciplinary practices and vocabularies leads participants to drift apart from their disciplinary culture, is underexplored. In this paper I investigate the boundary practices of digital humanities, referring to the interactions of scholars with cross-disciplinary collaborators and disciplinary peers, and how these are configured by disciplinary diversity and physical distance within collaborations. With an online survey, which received 173 responses, I find that the disciplinary diversity of digital humanities collaborations is often small, with participants and leadership mostly from the humanities. The physical distance is often large, increasingly relying on email. I do not find that these dimensions affect the respondents’ frequency of communication with collaborators or peers. I conclude that physical distance and disciplinary diversity cannot be confirmed to affect the frequency of boundary interactions of digital humanities. I furthermore conclude that digital humanities collaborations are biased towards the humanities, rather than a balancing of the digital and the humanities. This dataset thereby provides empirical grounding for discussions of digital humanities as a meeting between the computational domains and the humanities.