Scaffolding Collaboration

Abstract

Interdisciplinary collaboration enriches a digital humanities project’s values, goals, and outcomes. Digital humanities practitioners may benefit from paying attention to recognizing, blending, and incorporating methods from a range of fields to ensure that meetings and events maximize the benefit of attendance and uphold a project’s values. These values may include reducing the impact of hierarchical structures, encouraging learning, or allowing for diverse forms of contribution. This chapter seeks to explain why one particular aspect of collaboration – the structured workshop – is worth learning and practicing. This chapter draws on the authors’ experience in classroom teaching in schools and universities, delivering digital projects in the commercial sector, and leading large-scale, complex projects within cultural institutions and digital scholarship collaborations between cultural institutions, academic researchers, and practitioners. It also draws on their training in the fields of educational theory, and research and design for “UX,” or “user experience design.” As such, the two key theoretical frameworks are creativity workshops and pedagogical or classroom strategies such as scaffolding. The chapter describes how different workshop structures can be used to meet common goals in digital humanities projects. Examples will include a description and evaluation of structured activities used in teaching digital humanities subjects in a range of digital humanities and cultural heritage settings; and ideation and design processes for digital projects.