Creating Ethical and Sustainable Collaborations in Digital Recovery

Collaboration in the digital humanities offers rich possibilities for improving scholarship, fostering scholarly communities, and dismantling inequitable systems (Bradley 1213; Poole and Garwood 18687). But the frequent references to collaboration found in digital humanities scholarship have rightly been criticized for vagueness and lack of theorization (McCarty 2; Griffin and Hayler 1). The language of collaboration is often used to evoke ideals of parity and equity and a dismantling of academic hierarchy, but without tangible actions to create a truly ethical collaborative community of practice, the rhetoric falls short. Creating infrastructures to facilitate sustainable and principled collaboration is at the heart of the Recovery Hub's mission. From consultation at the earliest stages of brainstorming to peer review and showcasing of projects at all stages of their development, the Recovery Hub's services forge connections among aspiring and practicing digital humanists regardless of institutional context, affiliation, or resources. This essay outlines some models of collaboration and offers some best practices for creating collaborative environments derived from the Recovery Hub's experience in its pilot phase.