This paper explores infrastructure supporting humanities–computer science research in large–scale image data by asking: Why is collaboration a requirement for work within digital humanities projects? What is required for fruitful interdisciplinary collaboration? What are the technical and intellectual approaches to constructing such an infrastructure? What are the challenges associated with digital humanities collaborative work? We reveal that digital humanities collaboration requires the creation and deployment of tools for sharing that function to improve collaboration involving large–scale data repository analysis among multiple sites, academic disciplines, and participants through data sharing, software sharing, and knowledge sharing practices.

For readers of this special issue, data are likely defined in technical terms as established by information and computer scientists. Data, for the informaticist, are facts, measurements or statistics. For the historian, data are historical remnants—often preserved by an archive. For the anthropologist, data can be quantitative or qualitative depending on the question and methods. Disciplinary methods aside, data are not value-neutral and thus must be contextualized in terms of their acquisition, analysis, and interpretation in order to transform data into information. For humanists, the cultural complexities of data and information are not new. Anthropologists, historians, linguists, museum curators, and archivists have long probed the contextual subjectivities of knowledge production and representation. From ink and quill maps representing the New World to the carefully stratified layers of an archeological site, data in the humanities are always subject to the systems of knowledge that were used to capture, represent, and disseminate them.

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Chasing Objectivity? Critical Reflections on History, Identity, and the Public Performance of Indian Mascots examines the role of the objectivity within the discipline of history via explorations of research into Native American sports mascots. I argue that Whiteness and other aspects of privilege are intimately, and publicly, entwined with the practice of “doing” history and that through explorations of historical narratives of race, we can reveal the limitations of the subjective-objective divide and the weight of our own privilege as academics and members of the broader American culture.

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