Week 3

This week, I was most interested in the emphasis on collaboration in digital humanities projects, and how atypical this is for many historians, who are incentivized in part by the tenure process to focus on single-author projects. Gabriele Griffin and Matt Steven Hayler’s piece on “Collaboration in Digital Humanities Research – Persisting Silences” gave some helpful typologies (i.e. collaborations that could include human-human, human-machine/material, and machine/material-machine/material) and noted where we tend to overlook important interactions.¹ For me, it was important to acknowledge silent human-machine and machine-machine interactions. As Griffen and Hayler note, the impact of silencing these interactions “means that processes are constructed as inadvertent and hence beyond our agency. It fosters a ‘learned helplessness’ [Seligman 1972] and leads to situations where academics in their 40s talk of themselves as ‘dinosaurs’ because they do not engage with, are alienated from, and think they cannot understand contemporary technologies.” (15) That’s me. But in defense of mid-lifers, our lives tend to be so full of life and caretaking processes, forms, hold music, and other mind-numbing human-machine interactions, that just one more feels like it will break us. Best to protect ourselves with dinosaur analogies. 

In class and offline, we formed our class project groups. My group – composed of Alexa Koeckritz, Andrew Snowman, Chris Pfeifer, and me – converged almost immediate around the idea of using Andrew and Alexa’s access to and knowledge of Fairfax County archives to work on a practical project related to Tinner Hill, the site of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)’s first rural branch.² In line with our readings for the week, collaborations will be crucial if we want this project to have any value beyond the length of the Clio Wired class. To make the project useful to the community we’re researching, we intend to reach out to the Tinner Hill Foundation, with whom George Mason has collaborated in the past. Just as we are asked to conduct an environmental scan for other digital humanities projects to build our work on, we acknowledge that our research exists in a larger relational ecosystem. How can we build on existing relationships that will strengthen the ecosystem of support for the research and increase its changes of being relevant, useful, and long-lasting? Our first step was to reach out to Dr. Oberle and Dr. Berger, affiliated with George Mason’s Center for Mason Legacies and African American Studies Department respectively, who have both collaborated with the Tinner Hill Foundation in the past, including on the 100 Years of Black Falls Church digital humanities project. We will align with Dr. Oberle and Dr. Berger, learn from their past experience collaborating with the Foundation, and hopefully be able to approach our potential community partner with credibility and direction. I’m anticipating potential differences in agendas, which we will need to acknowledge and work with. These are natural when one institution is primarily focused on furthering a research agenda and another likely has more programming, advocacy and consciousness-raising aims. This will be the fun part – figuring out what new thing we can create that reflects the values and purpose of our different collaborators, including our own project group. 

1. Griffin, Gabriele, and Matt Steven Hayler. 2018. “Collaboration in Digital Humanities Research – Persisting Silences.” Digital Humanities Quarterly (Providence) 12 (1). https://doi.org/10.63744/87teba78tftp ↩︎
2. Tinner Hill Foundation. “History, Hope, Healing: Presenting the African American legacy and Promoting Racial Reconciliation in Northern Virginia.” Accessed September 17, 2026. https://www.tinnerhill.org/our-mission  ↩︎