Collective Praxis, Collaborative Publishing: The Case of the Data-Sitters Club

The Data-Sitters Club (https://datasittersclub.github.io/site/index.html) is a pedagogical resource consisting of “books” that explore themes and methods from digital humanities and computational text analysis in colloquial and accessible ways, using Ann M. Martin’s Baby-Sitters Club series as the corpus for analysis. In this article, the collective of six scholars who form the project’s core—and who were themselves fans of Martin’s books as teenagers and young adults—elaborate on the ways that the Data-Sitters Club’s composition, content, technical design, workflows, and writing processes push back against the competitive, individualistic tendencies in humanities research that foreclose new possibilities for thinking, working, and creating within the academy while also creating space for, and taking seriously, the importance of failure in iterative research practices. We present the project as one model for an alternative way of imagining scholarly communication that prioritizes the collaborative and therefore a relational, rhizomatic approach to academic life in place of a hierarchical one circumscribed by the practices of the university today. Following calls from critics such as Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Sandy Grande, and Bethany Nowviskie to commit to collectivity, reciprocity, and mutuality above competition and individualism, we put forward the Data-Sitters Club as an example of how scholarly practices might be reimagined through collaborative publishing.