Des collaborations équivoques

Abstract

As they get involved in scientific projects that require the building of a new digital infrastructure, researchers in the humanities and social sciences (HSS) are led to collaborate with information technology (IT) specialists. These collaborations are an important aspect of what digital humanities imply for the HSS. This paper seeks to describe some characteristics of such collaborations. It draws on an ethnographic fieldwork conducted among developmental psychology researchers affiliated to a digital humanities laboratory. We first describe the vigilance of the psychology researchers towards the IT specialists, as they question the quality and consistency of their contributions to the project. We then account for the planning efforts of the researchers struggling to ensure the project’s success. We show that these efforts mostly rest on the information given by the IT specialists and reflect on the consequences of this epistemic dependence. Our data consist of semi-structured interviews with members of the team, ethnographic observations of work practices and video recordings of meetings that gather the participants to the project.

Keywords

• collaboration
• digital humanities
• information technology
• research infrastructure
• vigilance
• deference