In “Crowdsourcing the Humanities: Social Research and Collaboration,” Geoffrey Rockwell asserts that the point of his chapter “is not to praise collaboration, but to ask how it can be structured through social media for research” (136). He goes on to explore crowdsourcing as an outcome of social media-enabled collaboration in the humanities. Rockwell surveys the arguments for and against digital humanities collaboration, and tends to come down in the middle: he doesn’t believe that collaboration is a “transcendent value” (138), but he also thinks that it can advance research. Rockwell provides examples of social knowledge creation projects he has led or been a part of, including the “Dictionary of Words in the Wild” and the “Day in the Life of the Digital Humanities.” He provides some tips for successful crowdsourcing or social knowledge projects. Overall, Rockwell argues for collaboration as a way in which the humanities can engage publics and reassert its cultural currency.

Work cited

Rockwell, Geoffrey. 2012. “Crowdsourcing the Humanities: Social Research and Collaboration.” In Collaborative Research in the Digital Humanities, edited by Marilyn Deegan and Willard McCarty, 135–55. Surrey, England: Ashgate.