Today, we will have a workshop with the MishMash work package leaders, and for that I thought it would be useful to run a new version of the RITMO coauthorship exercise. The goal is to make contribution expectations explicit early, and to practice making fair decisions when contributions differ in type, timing, and visibility.

Since MishMash embraces both artistic and scientific research and development, this version is designed for teams working across arts, humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, design, and engineering.

To simplify the task slightly, this version uses one shared scenario and three concrete outputs.

We typically set aside 60 minutes for the exercise, split people into small mixed groups (4-6 participants), and then compare group decisions in plenary.

One project, many disciplines, three outputs

Consider this scenario:

  • Professor Penelope secures funding for a multidisciplinary project on sonification of climate data in coastal cities.
  • Associate Professor Per co-develops the conceptual and ethical framework with Penelope.
  • Artist Aiko and Engineer Elias create an interactive public installation that is both an artwork and a data collection platform.
  • Engineer Elias builds the data pipeline and maintains the project codebase.
  • Statistician Stian conducts the mixed-method analysis.
  • PhD fellow Pia coordinates day-to-day data collection, conducts the qualitative analysis, and writes most of the manuscript draft.
  • Postdoc Peder develops figures for both the publication and exchibition and writes substantial parts of the paper.
  • Research assistant Runa handles recruitment and practical logistics.
  • Centre Director Calle secures additional funding to support the exhibition and provides comments on the project in group meetings.

The team produces three outputs:

  1. An academic publication
  2. An open project codebase
  3. A public gallery exhibit

Questions:

  1. Who should be listed as authors on the publication and in which order?
  2. Who should be listed as core maintainers/contributors of the codebase?
  3. Who should be credited as artist(s) in the gallery exhibit?

Follow-up case: reuse after team turnover

Six years later, the original project has ended. Professor Penelope and a new postdoc, Petra, run a follow-up study using parts of the old dataset and an updated version of the original software pipeline. They also produce a smaller touring exhibit version in a different city.

Additional conditions:

  • The old codebase is still being actively maintained by data engineer Elias.
  • The artistic concept is reused in modified form, but Artist Aiko is not involved in the new data collection.
  • None of the original PhD fellows or postdocs are in the new research group.

Questions:

  1. For the second academic publication, who should be authors, and in which order?
  2. Which reused contributions justify citation or acknowledgement, and which may still justify authorship or co-creation credit?

Debrief prompts

Use these prompts after group discussion:

  • Where did your group disagree most strongly, and why?
  • Did disciplinary norms (for example, single-author humanities traditions vs large-team science traditions) influence your decisions?
  • Did you treat design, engineering, and artistic contributions symmetrically with scientific writing contributions?
  • At what project stage should authorship decisions be revisited?

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