ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the opportunities for collaborative research in the humanities through two humanities computing projects that enabled collaboration through crowdsourcing. This will be framed by a discussion of collaboration in the humanities. In a section of the introduction to Humanities Computing called "Weed Control", Willard McCarty takes exception to the way in which collaboration has been taken as a "transcendental virtue, to be applied regardless of context". McCarty goes on, however, to make a stronger point about collaboration, that in the humanities, scholars have tended to be physically alone when at work because their primary epistemic activity is the writing, which by nature tends to be solitary activity. The Dictionary was developed with support from the Text Analysis Portal for Research (TAPoR) project at McMaster University. The Dictionary has been reported on at Digital Humanities 2008 at the University of Oulu and elsewhere.
