ABSTRACT
In this chapter, two main projects are focused on as a way of exploring the intersection of physical locations and collaborative dispersed networks: Transcribe Bentham (University College London) and the Devonshire Manuscript (at the University of Victoria, BC). Both projects are extensively collaborative, with Transcribe Bentham an academic crowdsourcing approach, and the Devonshire Manuscript a socially produced text; it is worth examining if these are also examples of what have been called “collaboratories,” that is to say an “environment” where the researchers’ “instruments and information are virtually local, regardless of their actual locations” (Committee on a National Collaboratory 1993, Executive Summary). In other words, the digital humanities lab is itself a site of activity that might be better described as a site of “interactivity,” a centralized coming together of digital humanists and a simultaneous dispersal and interconnectivity of researchers across a broad range of intellectual and practical domains. Such a vision sounds idealistic, although it describes how modern scientific lab-based teams coexist and interact; through this vision, there is the potential for new modes of scholarship to emerge,
although some critics remain sceptical. Andrew Prescott (2011) comments critically, for example, on a talk delivered by Melissa Terras at the 2010 Digital Humanities conference in which she suggests that crowdsourcing is one of the techniques that can lead to “new forms of engagement” in the digital humanities, shifting it “onto a broader stage” (63). Transcribe Bentham is the main crowdsourcing project that Terras utilizes in her talk, yet Prescott critiques this example at a number of levels:
[I] n Terras’s presentation there is no suggestion as to how Transcribe Bentham will change our understanding of Bentham or his ideas. Likewise, the website of Transcribe Bentham gives little sense as to how the project will advance scholarship beyond helping to create an eventual edition (whose exact nature is unclear); Transcribe Bentham in its web presentation appears as little more than an antiquarian homage to the founder of the university where the project is based.
