ABSTRACT
Collaboration' is a problematic, and should be a contested, term. It is used to denote what Peter Galison has called a transcendental virtue. The author expects is collaboration that is manifested in group after group of individuals, as has been instantiated at what Harold short named the Centre for Computing in the Humanities (CCH), signifying its success, the Department of Digital Humanities (DDH), at King's College London. The anthropologist and digital humanist Morgan Tamplin taught me to think about the changes wrought with the machine by meditating on the act of seeing an object of study 'as data'. The idea of the human as machine, something constructed and therefore constructible, has a long pre-history; it is implicit in 'Darwin's dangerous idea', as philosopher Daniel Dennett and biologists Jacques Monod and Ernst Mayr have shown. The computer is a product of many disciplines but chiefly those in the mathematical, physical, biomedical, psychological and social sciences.
