While reading the essays for this week, I kept returning to the idea of authorship. When I use a group of digitized artifacts, I am not usually aware of the “authors” of the collection, in the way that I am aware of the editors of a print-based literary anthology. My unexamined assumptions when using DH resources are that labor is so widely distributed that no one person requires credit, and that contributing to a digital archive is not the kind of work that receives scholarly credit; obviously, I now realize that these assumptions are not necessarily sound. Last week we discussed Ramsay and Rockwell’s argument that building is scholarship—does that make the “builder” of an online archive THE author, or is authorship shared with those who make smaller contributions? In other words, should there be a hierarchy of authorship? As Matt Cohen writes, collaboration within the digital humanities is a frequently touted value, but collaboration models do not easily fit within the structure of humanistic scholarship and “often risk re-creating the very hierarchies that have made it hard for digital humanities to become a widespread practice.”
Digital collections enable us to defamiliarize and, as a result, more clearly question standards of authorship. If digital archives tend toward a more generous view of authorship, one in which part time contributors receive credit along with central builders, perhaps we could use this standard for more traditional (print-based) forms of scholarship. Digital archives could suggest models of authorship that are more flexible than those used in the sciences, but more intentional than those used in wikis. Questions of authorship do not clearly come to light in a physical archive, where manuscripts are locked behind doors that can only be accessed by professionals, making clear the work done by real hands to preserve, maintain, organize, and build collections. Folsom somewhat dismissively refers to the “charm” of material archives, but this materiality has a real impact on user’s awareness of the creator’s intentions and labor. McPherson’s idea of “databases with a point-of-view” might help to make the “authors” of online collections more visible. Digital archives are not neutral, and more straightforward recognition and embrace of a collection’s “point-of-view” would bring light to the hands at work behind the screens.
