Humanities Collaborations and Research Practices: Investigating New Modes of Collaborative Humanities Scholarship

This paper presents preliminary findings from "Humanities Collaborations and Research Practices: Exploring Scholarship in the Global Midwest," (HCRP), a collaborative project led by librarians at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Indiana University that examines how collaborative and experimental research practices in the humanities affects scholarly practices, scholarly communication, and research outcomes. The HCRP study examines a series of multi-institutional humanities research projects funded by the Humanities Without Walls (HWW) Global Midwest initiative, a Mellon Foundation-funded consortium of Midwest university humanities centers. We conducted 27 semi-structured interviews with scholars from diverse humanities disciplines who were HWW Global Midwest awardees. The interviews explore how scholars share data, build self-generated research environment infrastructures for supporting data sharing and communications, and frame their collaborations in the context of broader goals. This short paper will offer new perspectives on scholarly communications and data curation in the humanities, as it will share valuable insights into how information professionals can engage with collaborative, experimental, and multimodal research.