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%\author{Andrea Zanni}
%\date{2010-04-12}

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\section{Collaboration as a new paradigm}
Collaboration has become increasingly important in our world. 
Collaborative projects are increasing in importance and possibilities, also in fields very different one from each other. 

The revolution of the (so-called) \textquotedblleft Web 2.0\textquotedblright is making \textit{social} every aspect of the digital world as an ecosystem 
(i.e. social tagging, social bookmarking, information sharing), but also the physical world is looking at himself as a \textquotedblleft globalized village\textquotedblright, 
in which multiculturalism and multilingualism are increasingly becoming a status \textit{de facto} and collaboration is becoming a necessity to cope with ever-growing complexity 
of the modern world. 

Web 2.0 is a neologism coined by the technological publisher Tim O'Reilly from \texttt{O'Reilly Inc}, in a conference in 2004\footnote{\textit{See} \citeA{oreilly2005}}. Although is a controversial expression\footnote{Many people have been criticizing the Web 2.0 label, arguing that there is no \textquotedblleft new Web\textquotedblright, but just an evolution of previously hidden features of the Web itself.
For the sake of simplicity, in the present study Web 2.0 label will be used to indicating a phenomenon of socialization of the Web and user empowerment. 
%For further widenings, see \citeA{}, \citeA{}.
}, it is now widely used for indicating a phenomenon of deeper socialization, openness and empowerment of users. 
O'Reilly defined it as follows:
\begin{quotation}
a set of economic, social, and technology trends that collectively form the basis for the next generation of the
Internet – a more mature, distinctive medium characterized by user participation,
openness and network effects \cite[p. 1]{musser2006},
\end{quotation}

Moreover, we have seen other \textquotedblleft revolutions\textquotedblright spreading in every sector of human socio-economic life, 
with the 2.0 brand pasted everywhere: \textit{Business 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Office 2.0, Library 2.0}, etc. 
Beside marketing strategies, which are pushing the adopting of new labels to attract customers, 
it is nevertheless easy to admit that \textit{collaboration}, aside communication and conversation, is a crucial part of this \textquotedblleft 2.0\textquotedblright 
revolution, and maybe it is his most hidden but yet most important feature.

\subsection{E-science}
Science has understood long time ago the power of collaboration, especially when supported by virtual frameworks. \textit{E-science, E-research, cyberinfrastructure, 
scholarship 2.0}, are some of the labels used to indicate a movement that exploits the digital world for creating a new kind of scientific work. 
Through the digital environment scientists can work collaboratively succeeding time and space, sharing costs, gathering different perspectives and skills and competences. 
Although competition is still present in scientific and research world, scientists did reach the conclusions that ambitious goals needed cooperation and 
collaboration of different individuals, different laboratories, different disciplines, even different nations. 
International research centers like CERN teach us that deep and huge collaboration is necessary to cope with huge problems, as those that occur in disciplines 
like \textit{High Energy Physics}, where complex and very expensive facilities are needed. 
Complex problems require complex solutions, and when complexity arises, different approaches, methods, disciplines, answers are demanded: thus you need \textit{collaboration}. 

The \textit{World Wide Web} itself was developed at CERN to be a framework for collaboration among users, namely \textquotedblleft a pool of human knowledge, 
which would allow collaborators in remote sites to share their ideas and all aspects of a common project\textquotedblright \cite{wardrip2003}.

According to his inventor, Tim Berners-Lee:
\begin{quotation}
The basic idea of the Web is that an information
space through which people can communicate, but
communicate in a special way: communicate by sharing
their knowledge in a pool. The idea was not just that it
should be a big browsing medium. The idea was that
everybody would be putting their ideas in, as well as taking
them out. | \cite{berners1999}
\end{quotation}

\subsection{Wiki, the Web and the \textit{wisdom of the crowds}}
An extreme form of collaborative projects are \textit{wikis}. 
Wikipedia\footnote{\url{http://www.wikipedia.org}} is obviously the best and best-known example: a titanic encyclopedia, counting 15 million articles (3 millions just in the 
English version), billions of readers every month, thousand of active users\cite{statsWP}. 
Still an ever-growing effort, Wikipedia is the icon and the symbol of the \textit{wisdom of the crowds} \cite{surowiecki2004} and of the power of cooperation among users.
Wikipedia is just one of the many projects involving users all around the Web: we are facing a phase of the Web were users are \textit{empowered} more and more everyday, and 
where UGC (\textit{User Generated Content}) has become a normal feature of many projects. 

Interestingly, the topic of collaboration has been investigated also in pioneering works about the future of libraries \cite{licklider1965}, 
of scholarship \cite{bush1945}, of publishing \cite{nelson1987} in the period of the first computers and computational machines.
 
Returning at the present day, \textquotedblleft Library 2.0\textquotedblright is often the label used to indicate the aim of make libraries more participatory 
\cite{lankes2007}, focused on empowering users and foster conversations. On the economics side, some have explored the theme of wiki in 
enterprises and firms, or in innovation-oriented workplaces \cite{cammarata2007}. Other have discussed the more general change of the whole business world, 
the advent of \textit{wikinomics} \cite{tapscott2006}.

\section{Motivation}
At the end of 2005, I discovered Wikipedia while I was searching something on Google; probably, a very common experience. 
It was a very exciting discovery: I was thrilled and amazed by the fact that you could edit and contribute to a collective encyclopedia, and that every user got 
the chance and the power to add some of his knowledge, to donate it to the world. 
Wikipedia gathers millions users all around the world, and thousand of them got so interested in the project that they become very active users, donating great amounts 
of their time to write and control articles, patrol recent contributes, check information, etc.

Through Wikipedia, in few months, I stumble upon another project, called \textit{Wikisource}\footnote{\url{http://www.wikisource.org}}, a wiki repository of public domain 
texts and books. 
Wikisource is a digital library of free of copyright texts, created and organized by a community of volunteers, exactly as Wikipedia. 
I soon became an active and enthusiastic user; few things could be more appealing to me than create a digital library, merging both my competences and love for 
computers and for books. I have been spending on Wikisource few years, learning and getting introduced to the world of digital libraries, even though from an amateur point of view. 

At the time, I was studying mathematics: for my bachelor thesis, I decided with my advisor to digitize an ancient book about history of mathematics and to upload it on Wikisource. 
I also had the chance to create a subproject about mathematical texts, and I coped for the first time with the issues of digitization of books.

After that experience, I met by chance my future professor and advisor Anna Maria Tammaro, within a conference about digital libraries.
Thus, I applied for the DILL master, and two years after this is the result of my path through the countless (and exciting) lessons, seminars, conferences experienced.

This master thesis, in a certain way, goes back to the roots, exploring the topic of collaboration within the Humanities scholar community in the Italian context. 
An underground motivation that boosted this study is in fact the strong belief in collaborative projects and in open access and sharing of knowledge. 

\subsection{The CERN experience}
During the master, a month has been dedicated to internship in a chosen institution. 
I got the chance to stay at CERN, the \textit{European Organization for Nuclear Research}, which is the most advanced research center in particle physics of 
all over the world, conducting extremely sophisticated experiments to unveil the fundamental mysteries of physics. 
Since its creation, CERN has made many important discoveries for which scientists have received prestigious awards, including Nobel prizes: 
one of these inventions is the \textit{World Wide Web}, developed, at the beginning, to improve and speed-up the information sharing between physicists working in different 
universities and institutes all over the world. 
There, I worked in the library institute, where I have explored the CERN digital library system, \textit{CDS Invenio}, 
an in-house developed information system software they use for providing access to over 1 million between articles, preprints, books, documents.   

What is more, CERN is an amazing location where to understand advantages and disadvantages of collaboration. 
At CERN, I observed the complexity of a huge and multicultural environment focused on e-science and large collaborative projects, a context where people from different disciplines and from different nations gather to unveil 
some of the mystery of the modern physics. 
The CERN context is indeed unique: several thousands of students, scientists and researchers from all over the world, who often stays at CERN for less than a year, 
and come from different disciplines and work in different areas, working on the most complex e-science instrument humans have ever made, the LHC (\textit{Large Hadron Collider}), 
a 27 kilometers-long particle accelerator.

\subsubsection{The open paradigm of HEP}
Particle physics, nowadays often called HEP (\textit{High Energy Physics}), is a in fact field of physics that demands incredibly expensive facilities, as a particle accelerator. 
This meant that different institutions, sometimes different governments (that's the case of CERN) had to collaborate for sharing costs, that were absolutely non affordable 
by single universities. Thus, from very beginning HEP had to cope with the advantages and disadvantages of collaboration that happened at all the different levels: collaboration among institutions, 
among disciplines, among researchers. 

HEP, and generally particle physics, is then a field where Open Access does work very well: due to the scarcity of important facilities (i.e. Fermilab, CERN), all articles are released in open access, 
in repositories as arXiv\footnote{\url{http://arxiv.org}}. 
Particle physics had the first catalogs of pre-preint literature in 1974 \cite{suberTL}, and spread largely the open access movement in 1991, 
when Paul Ginsparg started a repository to include pre-prints in physics, mathematics, computer science. arXiv is the most famous and biggest repository of scientific papers, 
and is an authoritative landmark for many fields of physics, mathematics, computer science.  

Thus, this specific field is a perfect environment for collaboration.
In decades, this has lead to an extremely rich and interactive knowledge environment, where information is shared openly and naturally, 
without the need of mandates or forcing \cite{oahep}.

The sharing culture of the particle physics community makes it a model for other communities of practice, 
especially in other scientific disciplines. In the last decades, the community has developed tools as arXiv (a disciplinar repository) 
and SPIRES\footnote{\url{http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/}} (the search engine) to unify and access the whole HEP literature. 
What is more, they are also trying to develop a new business model to cope with serial crisis in the field, creating
a project for making all the HEP literature go open access (SCOAP3\footnote{\url{http://scoap3.org/}}). 
%\section{Eco}
%Probably, the best achievement of the present research has been the interview of Umberto Eco as a prominent and important insider of Humanities
%in the Italian context. 
%Professor Eco is a worldwide known professor and author of best-sellers as \textquotedblleft The Name of the Rose\textquotedblright and 
%\textquotedblleft Foucault's Pendulum\textquotedblright.
%He is also a medievalist, semiotician, philosopher, literary critic and novelist: he has written from academic texts to children's books, 
%as well as many essays regarding very different topics, from politics to literature.

\section{Digital Humanities} 
Also Humanities have found in the digital world a brand new landscape to explore and exploit: interestingly enough, 
the rise of Digital Humanities coincide with the dawn of the first computers and mechanical machines of the modern era in the middle of the XXth century.    

Digital Humanities, also known as \textit{humanities computing}, started in 1949, when an Italian Jesuit priest, Father Roberto Busa, decided to do what even to this day is a 
monumental task: to make an index of all the words in the works of St Thomas Aquinas (and related authors), totaling some 11 million words of medieval Latin \cite{hockey2004}. 

In that year Father Busa met Thomas J. Watson, the founder of IBM, in the United States, and found support for his project, with the aid of the first computers of the modern era. 
Father Busa did not want to make a purely mechanical concordance program, where words are alphabetized according to their graphic forms (just sequences of letters), 
but produced a more complex and time-consuming \textit{lemmatized} concordance, where words are listed under their dictionary headings, not under their simple forms. 
\citeA{hockey2004} highlight the originality and vastness of Busa's vision:
\begin{quotation}
His team attempted to write some computer software to deal with this and, eventually, the lemmatization of all 11 million words was completed in a 
semiautomatic way with human beings dealing with word forms that the program could not handle. 
Busa set very \textit{high standards} for his work. His volumes are elegantly typeset and he would not compromise on any levels of scholarship in order to get the work done faster. He has continued to have a profound influence on humanities computing, with a vision and imagination that reach beyond the horizons of many of the current generation of practitioners who have been brought up with the Internet. 
A CD-ROM of the Aquinas material appeared in 1992 that incorporated some hypertextual features (\textquotedblleft \textit{cum hypertextibus}\textquotedblright) [Busa 1992] and was accompanied by a user guide in Latin, English, and Italian. Father Busa himself was the first recipient of the \textit{Busa award} in recognition of outstanding achievements in the application of information technology to humanistic research, and in his award lecture in Debrecen, 
He has continued to have a profound influence on humanities computing, 
\textit{with a vision and imagination that reach beyond the horizons of many of the current generation of practitioners} who have been brought up with the Internet.
\end{quotation}

For a more specific definition of DH, \citeA{roncaglia2002} provides a list of features:
\begin{itemize}
 \item use of digital tools for ecdotic and philology
 \item use of mark-up languages for structure, formal, semantical representation of texts, and attachment of interpretative and descriptive metadata
 \item study of instruments for attachment of multimedial meta-information
 \item reflection on digital documents and its features
\end{itemize}

Digital Humanities are thus an interdisciplinary field that meets literary studies and computer science: it has been suggested that nowadays
DH are just exploring digital tools for a wider (and sometimes deeper) approach to texts and to textuality.
Nevertheless, this new-born and hybrid field, is sometimes ostracized by both the computer science and humanities communities, which tends to be conservative
and not consider as a proper field such a blurred area of research.

\section{The Italian context} 
Italy is a country with a invaluable cultural heritage, due to his long and noble past. 
From the Romans to the Renaissance, Italy has been the location of amazing characters who has carried on the art, the knowledge and the culture of humanity.
Very few nations can claim a cultural heritage so rich and beautiful as the Italian one\dots 
Though, this noble past is sometimes a burden not easy to carry. For example, Italy is one of the few countries which own two national libraries instead of one. 
Due to the vast amount of documents and cultural objects, and due to its troubled has often privileged a \textit{conservative} approach towards its cultural heritage and traditions,
with few openings to innovation. This approach has also been quite closed, in the aim of preservation instead of access. 

Italy still lacks institutional digital libraries comparable with great national projects as the French Gallica\footnote{\url{http://gallica.bnf.fr/}} or the
American Memory\footnote{\url{http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/index.html}}, and even in European collective projects as Europeana\footnote{\url{http://www.europeana.eu/portal/}} 
the presence of Italian documents is minimal (and sometimes provided greatly by non-Italian institutions as Gallica).
What is more, even though Italy can boast centuries of culture (in almost every field of human creation), still little has been done to digitize this content and make it 
available online. Several nations, with far more humble and smaller heritages, spend greater effort in digitizing cultural heritage material. 

Thus, in Italy amateur digital libraries (which followed the example of the legendary Gutenberg Project\footnote{\url{http://www.gutenbergproject.com}})
still are a landmark for users and scholars too. 
Liber Liber is by far the most famous digital library in Italy, and it runs an amateur volunteer-driven digitization project since 1993.
Wikisource, the wiki digital library whom the researcher is an administrator, largely followed the path of Liber Liber, reusing part of the early digitized collection, 
which is composed primarily by public domain, out of copyright Italian texts. 

Therefore, within the Italian context amateur projects still play an important role for disseminating and providing access to digitized collection.
Both these projects are volunteer-driven, and their communities offer a valid and interesting comparison with scholar communities of practice.
 
\section{Humanities, Digital Humanities and Collaborative Ligital Libraries}
Father Busa states that there are only three types of \textit{textual informatics} \cite{massarenti2002}:
\begin{itemize}
\item \textbf{documentary}: it involves databases and repositories online
\item \textbf{editorial}: it involves the dissemination of the text through different media (CD-ROM, DVD, websites, etc.)
\item \textbf{hermeneutic}: it involves \textquotedblleft statistical, classificatory observation of linguistic facts written on large masses of natural texts, 
and current representative.\textquotedblright It also involves their markup and their lexicological aspects, etc. 
\end{itemize}

Furthermore, he claims that the hermeneutic is the far more interesting and complex among the others: in fact, this kind of study and observation
has been little explored, and introduce us again in a field where corpora and digital libraries are laboratories, framework where to work on texts, 
provided with helpful tools.
Despite Busa's vision and works, little seem to have been accomplished in this field, in the Italian context.

Regarding the same topic, \citeA{tammaro2009}, recalls the definition of \textquotedblleft collaboratories\textquotedblright from e-science, and therefore applies the same 
definition to this new kind of digital libraries:
\begin{quotation}
[a collaboratory digital library is a] research library, which is proposed as an infrastructure for scholars within Humanities, 
and which includes the whole cycle of creation, dissemination and use of digital resources 
to support collaborative cognitive processes. 
The management of the collaboratory digital library considers a variety of creative collections
digital and stimulates new relationships with scholars and experts, using the tools of the participatory Web.
\end{quotation}

Moreover, \citeA{cox2006} defines the kind of relationships that Humanities scholars and digital libraries should reach:
\begin{quotation}
\item integrated access to rare and fragile sources difficult to retrieve, which are distributed in a network of cultural institutions;
\item enhance and facilitate wider dissemination and use of classical sources, including also non expert audience;
\item make possible new types of advanced research on digital objects, consisting in multimedia documents or large hypertexts;
\item ensure long-term preservation of the digital collection.
\end{quotation}

%\section{Aim of the research}
%How can digital library increase collaboration? How can they exploit the socialization of the Web? 
%More specifically, can digital libraries be based on wiki? Are users ready for collaborative digital libraries? Do they want them?
%The research will explore this theme, with interviews and surveys to a specific Italian community of practice, the Italian Studies and Humanities scholar community.

\section{Research hypothesis, questions and objectives}
Moreover, the experience gained at CERN taught once again the researcher the importance of an open, interactive and collaborative environment for scholars and researchers. 
Collaborative e-science projects observed at CERN can be used as models also for different disciplines, where can be applied in minor scale. 

Therefore, I decided to shift on Humanities. 

Libraries, together with archives and the others \textit{memory institutions}, have always been the \textquotedblleft laboratories\textquotedblright of Humanities. 
Thus, a good question for librarians and scholars should be how to effectively exploit digital libraries for research.
Digital libraries could in fact boost their collaborative dimension to become frameworks for scholars and researchers.

More specifically, could be digital libraries collaborative frameworks an aid for researchers? 
Could Digital Humanities assume the collaborative paradigm of the e-science?
Could be digital libraries be more social and collaborative? Could they be based on social softwares as wikis?

These were the background questions that introduced the present research.  

Research questions came straightforwardly. It is my aim to show 
the importance of such collaborative projects, specifically a collaborative digital library 
(that it will be often referred also as a \textit{collaboratory} digital library) for the Italian Humanities community as the object of my study.
The Humanities scholars' perception towards collaboration, in Italy, has not been analyzed yet: in fact, there seems to be a closed approach towards innovation. 
This is a gap that the present research would like to fill, at least in part, within the limits of the involved resources.
Digital Humanities community will be taken as a privileged speaker to investigate these topics.
Firstly, due to their competence, expertise and engagement with the digital environment; secondly, because they are probably
more interested than other scholars in the existence of collaboratories digital libraries. 

The research hypothesis of the present research is thus that collaboration is a facilitator for research and innovation:
thus, collaborative digital libraries should help and aid scholars in their activities. 
Do researchers want such a digital library?
This is the main objective of the research. 

Three research questions came up:
%\begin{itemize}
\newline

\textbf{H1}: Can a digital library for the Humanities community within the Italian context be \textit{collaborative}?

\hspace{8pt}\textbf{H2}: Can a digital library for the Humanities community within the Italian context be a \textit{collaboratory}?

\hspace{16pt}\textbf{H3}: Can a digital library for the Humanities community within the Italian context be built upon a \textit{wiki}?
%\end{itemize}
\newline

The objectives of the research then are:
\begin{itemize}
\item to analyze perception of Humanities scholars (particularly of Digital Humanities) towards collaboration and digital collaborative projects
%\item to investigate collaboration in Humanities communities of practice
\item to investigate wikis to be a possible framework for a collaboratory digital library
\end{itemize}

 
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