Digital Humanities Project Management as Scholarly Exchange (original) (raw)

In this paper I take somewhat of a polemical approach in my argument that, along with more recognisable scholarly practices such as researching, writing, making, and publishing, project management is a key scholarly practice in the digital humanities and in the humanities more broadly. I hope this polemical approach will force humanists (digital and not) out of their lack of self-awareness about-or perhaps it might be better described as their deliberate disinterest in reflecting on-the crucial place of management in ensuring the maintenance and continuance of scholarly exchange, particularly in the digital humanities (DH). 1 This paper calls for a recognition of the digital humanities project manager as a research collaborator rather than a service worker. 2 I begin my discussion by defining the term "scholarly exchange" and describing the negative view of management in the humanities before arguing that scholarly exchange has always required managed collaboration, but that the managers are unfairly devalued as mere service workers. I then argue that collaborative digital humanities projects can offer a rich and invigorating opportunity for scholarly exchange that stands in stark contrast to the impoverished forms currently dominating academia. The DH project manager's key role, I argue, is to model how the project's scholarly exchange will take advantage of this opportunity, which involves four key foci: defining the bargain with team members; translating between team members; facilitating perpetual peer review; and researching scholarly exchange. Far from being an interloper into the digital humanities, project management and the project manager can be a key practice and role in realising a more fulfilling ecosystem of scholarly exchange. Scholarly Exchange and the Problem with "Management" I want to begin by defining and explaining the significance of the term "scholarly exchange." I use this term instead of "scholarly communication," "scholarship," or "research," for two reasons: One, it is capacious enough to incorporate and represent all of the activities (not just publishing) that are a part of the scholarly research process and that make up what I call the life-cycle of scholarly projects, including but not limited to ideation, planning, discovery, analysis, creation, review, and dissemination. Two, the term "scholarly exchange" foregrounds something that is often obscured or forgotten about scholarship: it is fundamentally reciprocal in nature. The people who are engaged in scholarship operate with a tacit understanding that it is imperative to share their ideas, feedback, projects, and time because they exist in a scholarly ecosystem where this results in things being shared with them (knowledge, skills, credit, mentorship, assessment, etc.) and that this is the necessary condition for