Putting The Pieces Together: Collaborative Research

As I mentioned yesterday afternoon, we hiked ourselves over to VKS once again (this time, without getting ourselves lost! VICTORY!) this time, to discuss collaborative research with Jan Kok, a senior researcher at VKS and IISH and Stefan Dormans, a postdoctoral researcher. Their lectures discussed the mechanics of collaborative research. Jan's presentation, "New Media in the Humanities: The Case of 'e-social History'" discussed the role of ICT in researching social history, defined by Jan as "the history of labor movements and social action". We know what kind of role new technologies play in scientific research, so what is the role of ICT in humanities research? First, with the advent and increased usage of online databases and archives for documents such as demographic or other municipal records from Paris in the 1930s, for example, research has become easier, in a sense, and the collective knowledge base has dramatically increased.

Another advantage of the digital age is the ability to collaborate with the guy at the next desk over, or across the world. With platforms like PBWiki (the platform we're using for this project) where you can create a wiki for your project and upload documents, pictures, multimedia, &c. for everyone to view and edit, together. Pretty cool, right? No more e-mailing, faxing or (g-d forbid) UPS overnight'ing documents back and forth - with the click of the mouse and a few keystrokes, you're working together: across the room or across the country. Anyway. Jan and Stefan's discussion on new media and technology in humanities/social science research was enlightening, and certainly helped us get a feel for how our projects will soon be assembled.

After their respective lectures, we were given a somewhat lengthy tour of a small portion of the IISH archives. Cold, drafty, musty archives. Not an experience I need to repeat. See, I'm all about old books and libraries and bookdust, but that's a little bit different than rotting clothes from 1980s squatters and decaying microfiche. Ew ew and ew.