Digital Work and Teamwork

by Zhihui Zou

Digital Humanities (DH) has been promoting humanities scholarship in two ways. We all know about the ways in which digital tools provide humanists fresh quantitative perspectives, tools, or methodologies for analyzing and understanding our modern, diverse, and complex society. The second, which is a much less discussed aspect with DH, is how it could change humanists ourselves.

The traditional single-author publications in the humanities have historically stood in contrast to the often multi-author counterparts in STEM or quantitative social science. This does not necessarily mean that humanities research can be done by one scholar independently from start to finish. Archivists, catalogers, data managers, librarians, fellow researchers, and students have all been key actors in humanities research. In the past summer, during my work supported by the Janet Chiang Grant, I have encountered firsthand how, as humanists, we can learn not just research methodologies and techniques from DH but also how DH’s interdisciplinary nature encourages humanists to reconsider the potential of “collaboration.” This contribution from DH is vital, as our learning and research today have often overlooked the need to reflect on how we engage with fellow humans in our field and not just with the materials.

Image

With Matthew Hayes (Duke University Libraries), I started the AsteXT research team in Summer 2025. This team studies Asian American short stories published in serial literary journals between 1974 and 2024 using Digital Humanities methodologies. Inspired by the work by scholars such as Lauren Fonteyn and Richard So (Duke English), this project aims to integrate tools such as Natural Language Processing and database construction to approach Asian American literature from a scalar perspective.

The Janet Chiang Grant also allowed me to attend and present at the American Literature Association’s 2025 conference on a theoretical end vision of the AsteXT project: a semantically searchable, public-facing database for Asian American short stories. Semantic search refers to the technique that matches the underlying linguistic meaning of the user’s search query syntax with the meaning of materials in the database, allowing results that do not identically and syntactically match the search query (the technique that traditional keyword search relies on) to be returned to the user.

Through the Data+ program at Duke University’s Rhodes Information Initiative, Matthew and I worked with PhD student in English Julia Gordon—who also served as the Project Manager over the summer—and five undergraduate researchers to achieve AsteXT’s end vision. Besides the wonderful literary and technical discussions that we engaged in, what stood out to me was an acknowledgement, direct or indirect, of viewing individual contribution or participating not by an arbitrary metric of one’s “academic production” but by the new directions, perspectives, or combinations of those in existence that one can bring to a team.

AsteXT’s summer team had the privilege to include members from Computer Science, Literature, Religious Studies, Data Science, History, and other disciplines. All these fields can engage in DH, as I do not view DH as a tract that someone measured in academia’s land management. Instead, I view DH inherently, amongst many other things, as a methodology to achieve a mature partnership of practitioners from various disciplines. This partnership can thus provide products, questions, theses, or knowledge that a group of practitioners from one discipline will have a difficult time to achieve.

For example, a task in the team’s summer research was to analyze how Asian American short stories perceived the concept of “space.” This task would allow AsteXT database’s users to search for stories by inputting theme-based queries (in this case, the theme would be a story’s perception of specific “spaces”) without knowing the story title, author, publication year, or publication journal. Such a question has traditionally been tackled using theories from disciplines like geography, philosophy, history, or sociology, resulting in — more often than not — a case study of one locale, individual, or community’s perception of one conception of “space.” With our team’s expertise in data management and computer science, we were able to add on to the historical practices to expand our analysis and build a data infrastructure that can take into consideration multiple dimensions of “space” at once by incorporating a technique called Named Entity Recognition. We not only studied the mentioning of geopolitical entities but also took into consideration more fluid “spaces,” such as homes, schools, workplaces, parks, streets, shops, and others. The consideration of multiple categories of “space” might not sound like a difficult task when examining one piece of literature, but, when performed at scale, a robust system of data documentation and visualization is necessary to ensure an analysis with traceable and interpretable evidence.

DH’s nature of bridging the humanities and STEM practices provides an opportunity for humanists to rethink who gets to be a part of our work and who gets to be recognized. This field’s requirement of close teamwork exposes how the humanities-STEM intellectual border has often been a line drawn in the sand of human curiosity and knowledge, posing more hindrance to intellectual pursuits and curiosity than good. In our modern and evolving world, such a disciplinary divide especially poses barriers for researchers and students to raise questions that are timely. There exist, of course, challenges in merging practitioners from various disciplines. We see them in our everyday life and work (everyone has complained about that one group work, committee meeting, or collaborative research that resulted in heated disagreements or conflicts). To DH, these challenges are what make this field an exciting subject. It requires scholars to develop a mature model of teamwork replying on both personal connections and proper communication channels, information sharing, file management, and other methodological practices.

Some people might raise the concern that the vast variety of techniques practiced in DH might be overwhelming for one researcher to grasp. DH is not aimed at turning one individual into the master of all fields; its focus on collaboration recognizes the impossibility of such a goal. Rather, DH’s underlying spirit is to build a framework to allow easy combination of skillsets from different practitioners.

Regardless of one’s training background, we spend most of our time learning or practicing how to manipulate information and knowledge in our own field, creating an illusion of independence or independent work. But we humanists rarely complete our work truly independently. We receive both direct or indirect support from archivists, interview subjects, assistants, technicians, librarians, students, or even a casual chat with a colleague at a cafe. DH is not the only approach to rethinking collaboration; it is, though, a good reminder for the importance to systematically rethink how we practice collaboration in humanities research today