Who Did What When? Acknowledging Collaborative Contributions in Digital History Projects

Abstract

Using the example of Liberated Africans (www.liberatedafricans.org/), this paper examines the difficulties of citing, and assigning credit for, highly collaborative digital humanities research projects in the context of tenure, promotion and the job market. This digital history project traces the lives of tens of thousands of individuals the British recaptured during their efforts to suppress and abolish the slave trade leaving Africa after 1807. The creation, development, release and relaunch of new versions of open source websites and digital archives sometimes build and expand upon the historiography, archival digitization efforts, metadata development, previously published datasets, and often other digital projects. The creation, expansion and relaunch of Liberated Africans would not have been possible without the international and interdisciplinary collaboration and contributions of historians, archivists, computer programmers, digital humanities centers, graduate research assistants and granting agencies. This paper discusses the collaborative process involved in the relaunch of the second version of Liberated Africans in 2018 and serves as an example of how a timestamped project history can assess and recognize individual contributions within a major digital research project which depends on the involvement and input of an interdisciplinary network. This digital project history discusses the many contributors to the historiography, efforts to digitize primary source materials, initial website design, website redevelopment and dataset contributions. It is argued that the publishing of project histories is best practice for understanding the distinction between individual research contributions and service contributions within the burgeoning area of digital humanities research. Without opportunities to publish project histories in peer reviewed journals, digital projects might not be acknowledged as meaningful research contributions and might not receive the same recognition as traditional print publications.