Digital Scholarship in the Humanities & Social Sciences: Common Themes

Allan ChoIrving K. Barber Learning Centre

Woodward Library Working Group Meeting - March 7, 2017

Why Humanities? Providing The Context

1. Common definition of digital scholarship?

2. Common themes between health,

sciences & humanities research

• data, GIS, open access, scholarly communications, etc.

3. Supporting Faculty

• tenure, promotion, & review

4. Measuring digital scholarship -

• Alt-metrics? NYU Libraries

Areas of Digital Scholarship in the Humanities and Social Sciences

• Examining Digital Objects from a Humanities Perspective - e.g. fields of media studies and software studies

• Digital Pedagogy - technology in the classroom - e.g. course blogs, websites, podcasts, webcasts, etc.

• Digital scholarly communication - using technology to explore new forms of scholarly interactions - e.g. scholarly blogs, social media

• Digital Collections and Archives creation - digitizing and providing access to physical and born-digital collections

• Humanities Computing - using computers to identify patterns in data (texts and images) and then interpreting those patterns - text analysis, GIS, network analysis

Solo Scholarship in the Humanities

Traditional humanities scholars work in solitude and on paper

• It is unusual to work in partnership in the humanities – and not always looked upon kindly in tenure evaluations

Tenure, Promotion, and Review in the Humanities

In the contemporary tenure system, receiving tenure requires peer reviewed monograph, promotion to full professor requires at least a second monograph

(Cheverie, 224)

Teaching versus Research Scholarship

Online teaching has gained wide acceptance but online scholarship has yet to achieve the same acceptance and rewards as traditional scholarship

• Digital scholarship can be “self-published,” but in traditional scholarship models it is looked down on (Cross, pg. 550).

National Library of Austria]

Modern Languages Association (MLA)

Modern Languages Association (MLA) has taken a strong leadership role, issuing Guidelines for Evaluating Work with Digital Media in the Modern Languages in 2000

• The American Historical Association (AHA) sent a survey to History Department Chairs

• Very few chairs indicated their departments had formal written policies for assessing technology-related activities concerning tenure (pg. 555)

• Technology is encouraged in teaching, but not research

Research Scholarship

• Whereas teaching conforms to an understood and agreed curriculum and service is represented by university committees, research is individual and specialized.

• Research is the most highly regarded of the three strands, yet the hardest to judge

• Most difficult for a general committee to assess (Weller, 350)

Tenure, Promotion, and Review

• DH evaluation is held back with new forms of scholarship because it lacks a roadmap for how to attribute credit for digital projects

• Positive promotion and tenure decisions are based on grants and publication in top-tier journals

• Who should be the referees of such projects, and with what criteria for content, visual design, and engineering?

Tenure, Promotion, and Review

Applying traditional tenure guidelines to digital scholarship will fail, because the traditional processes and scholarship are profoundly different

(Cheverie, pg 225)

ReferencesCross, Jeanne. Reviewing Digital Scholarship: The Need for Discipline-Based Peer Review. Journal of Web Librarianship. 2(4): 2008- 549-566.

Anderson, Steve, and Tara McPherson. “Engaging Digital Scholarship: Thoughts on Evaluating Multimedia Scholarship.” Profession 2011: 136-151.

Cheverie, Joan, Jennifer Boettcher, and John Buschman. “Digital Scholarship in the University Tenure and Promotion Process: A Report on the 6th Scholarly Communication Symposium at Georgetown University Library.” Journal of Scholarly Publishing. 40(3): 219-320, 2009.

Kirschenbaum, Matthew. “What is ‘Digital Humanities’ and Why Are They Saying Such Terrible Things About It?” Differences. 25 (1).

Grusin, Richard. “The Dark Side of the Digital Humanities: Dispatches from Two Recent MLA Conventions.” Differences. 25(1): 79-92, 2014.

Purdy, James, and Joyce Walker. “Valuing Digital Scholarship: Exploring the Changing Realities of Intellectual Work.” Profession. 2010.

Weller, Martin. “Digital Scholarship and the Tenure Process as an Indicator of Change in Universities.” Universities and Knowledge Society Journal. 9(2): 347-360, 2012.