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Panelists at HASTAC III’s “Born-Digital Scholarship: New Strategies, Projects and Possibilities” panel last year showcased scholarly projects produced by technologically-mediated forms of authorship and collaboration. The projects presented shared behaviors with many digital humanities and new media works. They network stories, concepts, and media. Their formats foster distribution through new digital techniques. They include agile software components that represent cultural protocols. Though these new media values are easily attributed to the published work, they also describe the collaborations that built the projects. The networked, distributed, and agile nature of new media collaborations provides an understanding of—and model for—the ways people interact and innovate in the post-Internet era.

The U.S. could use a refresher course on this model. At large chain retail stores in the U.S., patrons purchase products manufactured thousands of miles away, select from standardized inventories, and send their profits to corporate headquarters in urban centers. Bottlenecking goods and profits is great for efficiency but marginalizes those that might have needs outside the mainstream. And retail is only a snippet; when making financial, legal, environmental, and cultural policy decisions, as banks and governments do, it is society’s nuanced practices that are being bottlenecked.

Teams that create digital humanities projects often include a cultural specialist with an understanding of the parameters and relationships that should be reflected in the structure of the project. On the software side, free web-based publishing tools such as WordPress and Drupal have made web production easier than previous write-your-own methods. However, resisting the urge towards standardization, here we seldom see these pre-built applications leveraged for digital humanities projects. Rather, small spontaneous collaborations between scholars, programmers, and designers—such as those fostered by the Center for History and New Media, Vectors Journal, Institute for the Future of the Book, and U-Maine’s Still Water lab—are prevalent. They can easily incorporate overlapping cultural protocols with targeted, specific solutions while their larger pre-built counterparts struggle to accurately capture the nuances.

Furthermore, though pre-built software makes some implementation easier, users are limited to the features included in the last release. To add new features, users send requests to developers and hope that the developers listen. This top-down approach hinders grass-roots innovations in new media. Rather, teams are tinkering (Balsamo, 2009), re-purposing, and re-contextualizing in the open-source community: Twitter provides for distributing text messaging but is being used for conference back-channel conversations, highway traffic reporting, and to help you quit smoking (Geekpreneur, 2008). Linux, the free computer operating system, drives digital video recorders, cell-phones, and someday, Android—the Google-backed operating system based on Linux—will probably run your washing machine (Hansell, 2009). Users are even subverting centralized applications: CommentPress redraws Wordpress’ hierarchical commenting system as a text network, used recently for an open book peer review (Wardrip-Fruin, 2008).

The influence of new media values can reach beyond the digital to bricks-and-mortal organizations. Consider the University of Maine’s New Media Department: they created The Pool, a virtual space fostering idea exchange between students. The self-policing structure of The Pool helped form arguments for the ”New Criteria for New Media,” an innovative set of tenure standards now being used to promote faculty in their department (Ippolito, 2009). In fact the precedence of new media collaboration impacts all aspects of cultural planning, production, and preservation. There is an increasing amount of technology-based artwork that requires special expertise for building and maintaining. Conservationists working closely with technicians open doors to combat degradation caused by changing video, audio, software, or hardware standards. Involve artists and performers in documentation, and ephemeral, experiential, or performance-based content is re-produced in ways that preserve their original intent.

This panel will discuss the properties and values of new media collaborations and weigh their possibilities to combat globalization’s perceived negative consequences. Panelists will look inward at the digital humanities projects they are involved with, supporting the assertion that networked, distributed, and agile ways of working represent re-defined notions of hierarchy and collaboration. The topics of projects to be presented in support offer further insight into globalization’s effects and offer solutions.

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