This study reports on the pedagogic rationale, didactic design and implications of an AHRC-funded doctoral training scheme in collaborative and digital multimedia in the humanities. In the second part of this article we discuss three areas of provision that were identified as particularly significant and/or controversial. These include (1) desktop publishing and information design for academic posters, (2) quantitative, corpus-based approaches to text analysis, and (3) a discussion of the affordances and constraints of ‘collaborative’ Web 2.0 based research as reflected by participants and relevant theory.