Digital scholarship gathers diverse groups toward common goals. In contrast to the academy’s default emphasis on one's own profile, career, and work, digital scholarship of necessity must not rest on the shoulders of a Primary Investigator. It emerges instead from the hearts and minds of cross-departmental collectives of practice: teams, working groups, unconferences, nascent institutes, and collaborative projects.
Community is both imagined and intentional. The communities we build pull others toward ideals of common, shared labor; of attribution and recognition of invisible work; of the greater good as the guiding spirit in discussions of contention. The communities we build run not only across disciplines, but also across hierarchies. Digital scholarship is people: associate professors, graduate students, archivists, technical staff, directors, developers.
Our passion owes much to our freedom: digital scholarship professionals have almost unparalleled freedom to work across and between disciplinary boundaries. This flexibility does not just allow us, but in fact compels us to innovate in the face of outdated traditions and to bring people together to collaborate on the ongoing growth and development of new ideas and initiatives.