Making the Whole Greater than the Sum of its Parts. Taxonomy Development as a Site of Negotiation and Compromise in an Interdisciplinary Software Development Project

This paper describes the experience of a group of interdisciplinary researchers and research professionals involved in the PROgressive VIsual DEcisionmaking in Digital Humanities (PROVIDEDH) project, a four-year project funded within the CHIST-ERA call 2016 for the topic “Visual Analytics for Decision Making under Uncertainty — VADMU”. It contributes to the academic literature on how digital methods can enhance interdisciplinary cooperative work by exploring the collaboration involved in developing visualisations to lead decision-making in historical research in a specific interdisciplinary research setting. More specifically, we discuss how the cross disciplinary design of a taxonomy of sources of uncertainty in Digital Humanities (DH), a “profoundly collaborative enterprise” built at the intersection of computer science and humanities research, became not just an instrument to organise data, but also a tool to negotiate and build compromises between different communities of practice.