From Clio Infrastructure

A new approach to scholarly cooperation

A collaboratory consists of geographically dispersed groups of scholars who use computing and communication technology to enhance their access to colleagues and data. First and foremost, it provides opportunities for encounters, discussions, and sharing of ideas. A collaboratory is about bringing experts in a particular field together and having them share their data and ideas. A central feature of a collaboratory is the use of collaborative software, which provides complete location-independent access to content, documents and other researchers.

The concept of collaboratories or Virtual Research Environments has been developed in the natural sciences, e.g. in the form of international teams sharing an expensive instrument (see an overview of existing collaboratories).

For the Humanities, it is an innovative way of doing research. However, recent initiatives in setting up collaboratories in the Humanities have been promising, such as the collaborative projects on the history of the slave trade, on historical violence, on price and income history (GPIH in Davis, California), and the Global Labour Relations organized by the IISH.

The expertise on collaboratories from the institutes involved in CLIO-INFRA identifies efficient ways to put together large data sets, to review one another’s contributions and documentation and to reach agreements on estimation and extrapolation procedures. These collaboratories have been successful in having formats accepted by the international scholarly community.