Linking Data and Disciplines: Interdisciplinary brokering in digital humanities research

Interdisciplinary collaboration within digital humanities research requires brokering and boundary-crossing work. This article maps interdisciplinary exchanges between computer scientists, media scholars and information scientists to explicate how interdisciplinary brokering affects knowledge and tool production in the digital humanities. The analysis of qualitative data collected during a 17 month-long digital humanities research pilot - set to collaboratively test a digital Linked Open Data (LOD) search tool - provides insights into the exploratory search behaviour of a total of 122 (digital) humanities scholars, and how these insights informed brokering work within an interdisciplinary research team. The article argues that interdisciplinary collaboration first and foremost requires disciplinary recognition in order to succeed, and demonstrates how practical, empirical research insights - in this case about user research mobilize interdisciplinary decision-making processes. Conclusions indicate in what ways computational tools and collaboration affect knowledge production, and suggest that understanding the stakes of digital humanities research with digital audio-visual sources requires an integrated perspective characterized by both theoretical interdisciplinary discussions and their empirical, practical application. The article furthermore concludes that digital humanities brokering and boundary work should not only revolve around tool development, but also requires self-reflexivity in aligning epistemological chasms between disciplines by means of collaborative translation practices.