Environments for collaborating

Cloud-based services have made collaborating on scholarly material so much easier in the last few years that it’s hard to remember how onerous it used to be. (Raise your hand if you have ever hosted your own shared version control system.)

github is a prime example. In addition to version control,  github provides each repository with a wiki, issue tracking and other services that you can use entirely through your web browser. Edit version-controlled files through the browser or in the comfort of your own computer’s OS, and push them back to a shared repository.

While github solves nearly every challenge of collaborating on static files or data, it does not directly address the question of how to share computational processes. How do we share with collaborators when the goal is not to show the results of a process, but to share the process itself? This, like so many technical challenges in humanities scholarship, is a problem we have in common with programmers who have to collaborate on writing code, and who have kindly provided us with the solution.

Virtual machines are half of the answer. Consumer-level hardware and VM software have reached the point where we can realistically say, “No matter what OS you’re actually using, we’ll just use a VM so we can all work on this project in Ubuntu 12.04.”

The other half of the answer is a system like vagrant. Vagrant provides a way to specify the configuration of your virtual machine, and can work with many VM systems, including the freely available VirtualBox. The specification is expressed in a simple text file — ideal for sharing from your github repository! So starting from scratch, new collaborators can perfectly replicate the system you run in your project in these steps:

1. Make sure git is installed on their machines: http://git-scm.com/
2. Install virtual box on their machines: https://www.virtualbox.org/
3. Install vagrant on their machines: http://www.vagrantup.com/
4. Run this vagrant command: vagrant gem install vagrant-vbguest
5. Clone your project's git repository including a Vagrantfile specifying the configuration of your virtual machine

At this point, they can begin any work session within your repository directory by running

vagrant up

to start the virtual machine. (The first boot will be slow as the virtual machine is downloaded and built; after that, it’s tolerable.)

What is perhaps most remarkable about this sequence is that it imposes only two prior technical requirements on new collaborators: they must be able to use a web browser to download and install virtualbox and vagrant (and git, if they have not already done so); and they must be able to find a terminal or console where they can run a vagrant command. If that’s too much to demand, maybe it’s time for them to reconsider whether they’re really interested in collaborating on a digital scholarly project.