Hi, Brian -- I think and speak about these issues pretty frequently, and write about them lately, too:
http://nowviskie.org/tag/collaboration/
Of the posts in that category, I might highlight these two, which touch on some issues raised by your question, "What kinds of collaborations are needed to enable faculty (my emphasis) to participate in or create digital humanities projects?"
http://nowviskie.org/2009/monopolies-of-invention/
http://nowviskie.org/2010/on-compensation/
Collaboration is just about the last activity for which a typical graduate education in the humanities, or experience on the tenure track, might prepare you -- and our inherited institutional structures, policies, and assumptions often work against faculty as they first enter into very rich and (frankly) essential collaborations in the digital humanities. These folks need to be prepared to think carefully and make good decisions about the way they frame collaborations. Many times, they'll be PIs on their own first grants, and will suddenly -- with only past teaching experience to draw on -- have a small staff to manage, or large institutional partners to wrangle, often from differently-organized divisions of the university.
If I had your opportunity in being invited to give this talk, I'm sure I'd use it to raise awareness about some of the problematic divisions between faculty and staff -- research and "service" -- that really do, in an academic setting, require much more than a trite call for everyone to collaborate as equals (even if it's absolutely true that the most exciting DH projects I've worked on or encountered were crafted by faculty, staff, and students working as peers). Nope -- these problems actually require us to address institutional policies, such as those (generally different for faculty and "work-for-hire" staff) around authors' rights and intellectual property, or local practices that shape differently the notion of "compensated time" for different kinds of collaborators.
I'll be very interested in following this thread! I'm giving a talk in Melbourne next month in which I'll re-use my "Monopolies of Invention" title (the quotation is from a famous Thomas Jefferson letter against the use of copyright and patent to lock down the free circulation of ideas) for a different presentation -- this time adding a subtitle: "Collaboration Across Class Lines in the Digital Humanities."
So I'm hoping to see some great discussion and resource sharing in this thread!
