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Digital technology can facilitate collaboration and data sharing among humanities scholars, and therefore is sometimes seen as a catalyst for attempts to revise problematic canonical traditions in literary history. In this paper, I interrogate how specific ways of organising scholarly labour make possible certain forms of knowledge, and I study the obstacles scholars face when trying to adapt established organisational models. For this purpose I draw on fieldwork in a large European database project, launched to create empirical knowledge about “forgotten” women writers. Literary studies is characterised by monograph-oriented scholarship, situated in regional disciplinary contexts. The collaborative use of a database, however, requires an integration of individual research practices, and it blurs the division of labour between scholars and information professionals. In the present case, the inertia of established infrastructural arrangements manifested itself as a conflict between what was required to generate the specific type of knowledge the project aimed for, and the need for participants to engage in a more traditional form of knowledge production to advance their individual careers. The tension was better manageable in cases where the project conceded organisational authority to local contexts, an empirical finding with implications for established funding models for collaborative digital scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]