Collaborative Data Behaviors in Digital Humanities Research Teams

The development of digital humanities necessitates scholars to adopt more data-intensive methods and engage in multidisciplinary collaborations. Understanding their collaborative data behaviors becomes essential for providing more curated data, tailored tools, and a collaborative research environment. This study explores how interdisciplinary researchers collaborate on data activities by conducting focus group interviews with 19 digital humanities research groups. Through inductive coding, the study identified seven primary and supportive data activities and found that different collaborative modes are adopted in various data activities. The collaborative modes include humanities-driven, technically-driven, and balanced, depending on how team members naturally adjusted their responsibilities based on their expertise. These findings establish a preliminary framework for examining collaborative data behavior and interdisciplinary collaboration in digital humanities.