Working with Lives in Transit

Working with an existing project had both advantages and disadvantages. For one, creating something as laborious as a computer game—something I would not have been able to complete from scratch in roughly three months—was made possible by utilizing an existing framework. In my case, this did not cause any conflicts between what I wanted to do and what was possible, but it influenced how I designed my storyline. For example, the tasks are based on the exercises I encountered in the preexisting Lives in Transit demo and what I remembered of the playtest of Plantation Lives the previous year. If I wanted the player to virtually pick up an object in a 3D environment during an exercise and freely rotate it, this would not have been possible as Marugoto does not support 3D modules.

Also, working with project specific software meant that if I encountered an issue or did not understand something, I could not simply use Google to find a solution. While I was learning how to use Marugoto, the documentation was still a work-in-progress. Therefore, I either had to solve the issue by trial and error or consult someone more familiar with the project. Collaborative working and communication via GitHub and Gitlab, described in the previous section, once again were key aspects and key skills necessary to complete Feeling the Past. An unfinished project also meant dealing with newly occurring problems. In the case of Lives in Transit these were for example the dysfunctional importer and a bug during May. As a writer in the project I contributed to the solutions by reporting unexpected behaviour.

With more collaborative research in the humanities (and especially in digital humanities) being done, historians will need to learn how to act in and interact with project frameworks—both for the success of their own and the overarching projects. Putnam (2016, p. 400) argues that currently

historians are notoriously disinclined to collaborate, but in part that is because diffuse asynchronous collaboration (which is to say, reading other people's work and building on it) functions remarkably well for us.

Close collaboration and communication already are considered key components of 21st century competencies in STEM fields (Jang, 2016). History appears to be moving in the same direction. As Lynn Hunt notes

history writing in the global era can only be a collaborative form of inquiry, whether between types of approaches or between scholars from different parts of the globe. We are not just interconnected but also interdependent (Hunt, 2015, p. 151).

Critical voices argue that from a career perspective, co-authored collaborative work will be valued less than a independent project, therefore its popularity is connected to the nature of historical careers (Flaherty, 2017). There is an ongoing discussion regarding collaborative work in historical research and especially with more digital research being done, it seems a repositioning and restructuring towards more collaborative work in History is inevitable.