Scientific collaboration is improperly characterized as “growing” these days; it is all growed up.  Most "science" in the sense of physical and natural science is done in teams and groups (this varies between disciplines, but it seems pretty common across all the sciences).  How you coordinate the discrete capacities of the individual scientists has fallen a bit into background, as the processes and their replicability speak to an extra-subjective character to the knowledge thereby produced.  I think of this by reading this morning about a scientific discovery related to black holes.  It seems pretty interesting in itself—the discovery of an object larger than neutron stars but smaller than black holes—but what really stuck out to me was this: 

The combined LIGO-Virgo Collaboration consists of about 2,000 scientists around the world. The alphabetical listing of their names and institutions takes up the first five and a half pages of the new paper.

Now that is joint authorship.

We in the humanities don’t manage that.  Instead, the kind of knowledge we produce remains, it seems to me, irreducibly “subjective,” in the sense that it emerges from the subject’s irreducible capacities to see and discern and judge.  When we do collaborative work, we produce . . . edited essay collections of individual pieces, and they rarely relate to each other very well.

I’m not asserting some kind of ontological divide between two different kinds of knowledge here, I’m just noting divergent trends in how we know what we know, or what we claim to know.  Nor am I expressing science envy--I think I've metabolized my jealousy, such as it ever was, and now mostly have science admiration (but not idolatry; Thomas Dolby and the Manhattan Project worked that out of me long ago).

I have found pieces of collaborative writing and research that are truly coordinated; Horden and Purcell's book, The Corrupting Sea is one that leaps out at me.  But these are few and far between.

It's clear that individual scholarship is still insightful and valuable in the humanities.  Are there useful ways, however, for more serious forms of collaboration?  It's a serious question.