A few weeks ago, @Debbie quite rightly suggested that I should make a contribution to this Partnerships and Collaboration element of the consultation with regard to the partnerships that exist and could be built upon with humanities researchers: specifically, how such researchers can contribute to the planning, data modeling and data content of the Digital Extended Specimen. I at first replied within the conversation thread on the inclusivity pages (here 9. Workforce capacity development and inclusivity - #15 by MAFleming) but thought I should follow up on this thread too – though I will do this by adding on to some of the potential partner listings and cases for working with humanities scholars that I have already made on other threads, because you can find these through my GBIF/Discourse profile.
I wanted to let you know that there is interdisciplinary convergence emerging in research questions and practices between environmental historians, global and colonial historians, and natural historians in various working groups in the UK at least. For example, there is a UKRI funded programme at the moment called ‘Hidden Histories’ which is co-funded by the Natural Environment Research Council and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) – UKRI). This may not look like a lot of money, and it may seem ‘niche’, but it is attracting nathist museum colleagues and enabling interdisciplinary work that should interest GBIF given the range of currently open questions in your current consultation, from diversity and inclusion, to getting crucial analogue data into DES, to the ethics behind ABS.
NERC also built an online ‘collaboration finder’ to help researchers find each other and cross-pollinate (could GBIF do this for potential interdisciplinary/humanities partners?), then published an early findings document: Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) – UKRI
The University of Cambridge has co-funded a related network: “Empire & Environment, in the museum”, a new professional development network, exploring the legacies of empire and enslavement in natural history museums, and the ways those legacies are still influencing environmental science today." https://collectionsresearch.lib.cam.ac.uk/research-growth-networks/environment/environment-and-empire A significant number of UK nathist museum colleagues are joining this group, and it has an online workshop scheduled for 1 September 2021. Workshop | Research & Collections Programme
Of course, many of us in the humanities and socsci fields also have similar challenges to those so well described in the Background outline to this section 11 of the consultation. And we have some solutions that might be helpful, too. It would be great to have a platform in which we could share.