Conclusion: Critical Considerations for Interdisciplinary Collaboration
We have used this module to show how digital spatial storytelling can both showcase and benefit from interdisciplinary collaboration, with the capacity to foster creativity and produce hybrid, perhaps more inclusive, stories about the earth. However, it is also important to recognize that collaboration and interdisciplinary partnerships are neither inherently nor always good. Even when tensions are considered productive for some interdisciplinary pursuits, they can also reveal the challenges, and even potential harms, involved when working across disciplines, institutions, and other knowledge communities (Callard, Fitzgerald, and Woods, 2015). These might include the (often unintentional) reproduction or repackaging of the very power inequities that interdisciplinary collaboration might seek to resolve, such as colonialism or sexism that gets re-embedded in the research process.
One of publications that came out of historical-geographical research on the interdisciplinary histories of the McGill “Caribbean Project,” written by Greer et al. (2018), concludes with a similar caution about uncritically championing interdisciplinary research of the past. They explain this need to think more critically about how such stories are told, situating the Caribbean Project within colonial histories and global geopolitics of the time:
If not explicitly acknowledged at the time, the Caribbean Project was indeed situated within a broader reconfiguration of “tropicality” and geopolitical claims during the early Cold War. Although it is unclear whether the McGill geographers saw their research as supporting or disrupting prevailing late colonial perceptions of the tropics, the historical record invites an important question: To what extent was the research done in Barbados in the 1950s and 1960s another example of the exploitation of a “new frontier” (spatially, temporally, and epistemologically), and thus bearing analytical links to McGill’s Arctic and subarctic research programs? Or, put another way, how did the interdisciplinary research of McGill’s Caribbean Project both challenge and further neocolonial knowledge production (however unintentionally)?
Digital humanities storytelling, however, also provides an opportunity to challenge taken-for-granted assumptions about the interdisciplinary histories it seeks to understand. For example, in the same publication, the authors used archival research (including digitized reports, letters, photographs, and yearbook entries) to not only highlight the forgotten histories of interdisciplinarity but to also tell a deeper story about the more problematic elements and inequities of the field, including racism, sexism, and colonialism. They point to a 1964 report by glaciologist E. T. Stringer, showing the selection criteria for McGill researchers for the Caribbean project, which draws on sexist and racist assumptions about women and “tropical living”:
“Students selected for work in Barbados should have drive and not be the type to succumb to tropical living; women students in particular should be mature, stable, adaptable and academically bright.”
Using HGIS to do, share, and historicize interdisciplinary research, allows for a multi-layered examination of the constellations of power noted above. The ability to present layered, polyvocal stories about a particular topic like the Caribbean Project, will never present a complete picture, yet affords a level of nuance that is often unachievable in more traditional academic formats.
Interdisciplinary collaborations in the digital humanities presents additional challenges navigating varied – and sometimes incompatible – knowledge systems, methods, and interpretations of research ethics (including authorship, ownership, access, and privacy across changing digital contexts). This does not mean digital humanities storytelling should never be pursued; rather, it provides an opportunity to approach all interdisciplinary digital humanities research critically, and with an ethics of care. As we will discuss further in the modules that follow, a care-based approach to digital humanities storytelling and storymapping can take on many different shapes, including: care and respect for the well-being of the people and places involved, careful research design that mitigates harm (whether environmental, cultural, physical, or emotional), and research that prioritizes relationship and reciprocity as forms of care.