Though modest in comparison to projects in medicine and in hard sciences such as physics, the OCDI is a kind of collaboratory, that is, “an organizational entity that spans distance, supports rich and recurring human interaction oriented to a common research area, and provides access to data sources, artifacts and tools required to accomplish research tasks.” This definition was offered by the University of Michigan’s Gary Olson in a 2004 article by Eric Bender published in MIT’s Technology Review. Olson directs a project at Michigan called Science of Collaboratories, which is studying the phenomena among scientists and developing resources for their improvement. While there are countless collaborative projects in the social sciences and humanities that are using digital tools, not that many are explicitly framing their work in terms of the collaboratory concept as it has developed in medicine, science and technology research. One that has, from which a great deal can be learned, is the Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Collaboratory (ARC). Led by Paul Rabinow, Stephen Collier, Andrew Lakoff, Christopher Kelty, and James Faubion and linking about nineteen scholars in numerous institutions, ARC is (as described here):
a collaboratory for inquiry into contemporary forms of life, labor, and language. ARC engages in empirical study and conceptual work with global reach and long-term perspective. ARC creates contemporary equipment for collaborative work adequate to emergent challenges in the 21st century. ARC’s current concerns focus on interconnections among security, ethics, and the sciences.
Two papers made available on the ARC site are of special relevance as they address the general nature and potentials of laboratories and collaboratories in the human sciences. See Stephen J. Collier and Andrew Lakoff’s 2006 ARC Working Paper “What is a Laboratory in the Human Sciences?” and Paul Rabinow’s 2007 ARC Concept Note “Steps Towards an Anthropological Laboratory.” Extremely helpful and productive is Chris Kelty‘s discussion of ARC on the weblog Savage Minds, which can be found here.
For a quick introduction to collaboratories in general, consult the wikipedia entry here.
