Vol. 1, No. 4, Fall 2012 on Journal of Digital Humanities

Bibliography

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The Problem Stated

Blais, Joline, Jon Ippolito, and Owen Smith. New Criteria for New Media. New Media Department, University of Maine, January 2007. http://newmedia.umaine.edu/interarchive/new_criteria_for_new_media.html.

Burgess, Helen J., and Jeanne Hamming. “New Media in the Academy: Labor and the Production of Knowledge in Scholarly Multimedia.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 5, no. 3 (2011). http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/5/3/000102/000102.html.

Closing the Evaluation Gap

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With this fourth issue we wrap up the first year of the Journal of Digital Humanities, and with it, our first twelve months of attempting to find and promote digital scholarship from the open web using a system of layered review. The importance of assessment and the scholarly vetting process around digital scholarship has been foremost in our minds, as it has in the minds of many others this year. As digital humanities continues to grow and as more scholars and disciplines become invested in its methods and results, institutions and scholars increasingly have been debating how to maintain academic rigor while accepting new genres and the openness that the web promotes.

How to Evaluate Digital Scholarship

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The purpose of this document is to provide a set of guidelines for the evaluation of digital scholarship in the Humanities, Social Sciences, Arts, and related disciplines. The document is aimed, foremost, at Academic Review Committees, Chairs, Deans, and Provosts who want to know how to assess and evaluate digital scholarship in the hiring, tenure, and promotion process. Secondarily, the document is intended to inform the development of university-wide policies for supporting and evaluating such scholarship.

Living in a Digital World: Rethinking Peer Review, Collaboration, and Open Access

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It’s no secret that times are tough for scholars in the humanities. Jobs are scarce, resources are stretched, and institutions of tertiary education are facing untold challenges. Those of us fortunate enough to hold tenured positions at financially stable colleges and universities may be the last faculty to enjoy such comparative privilege. The future shape of the academy is hard to predict, except to acknowledge that it is unlikely to remain static. Our profession is being rapidly reconfigured, but many changes are not happening quickly enough. In the realm of the digital, for example, entrenched traditional standards of assessment, support, and recognition still fail to encourage the kind of exciting new research that keeps our disciplines vibrant.

Tenure, Promotion, and the Publicly Engaged Historian

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Building on conversations within their respective organizations, in 2007 the American Historical Association, National Council on Public History, and Organization of American Historians organized a working group to evaluate public history scholarship.

Representing the American Historical Association were Kristin Ahlberg, Edward Countryman, and Debbie Ann Doyle; from the National Council on Public History were Bill Bryans, Kathleen Franz, and John R. Dichtl; and from the Organization of American Historians were Constance B. Schulz, Gregory E. Smoak, and Susan Ferentinos.

Evaluating Collaborative Digital Scholarship (or, Where Credit is Due)

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This is the lightly edited text of a talk given at the 2011 NINES Summer Institute, a National Endowment for the Humanities-funded workshop on evaluating digital scholarship for purposes of tenure and promotion, hosted by the Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship. It builds on a more formal essay written for an open-access cluster of articles on the topic in Profession, the journal of the Modern Language Association (MLA). A pre-print of that essay was provided to NINES attendees in advance of the Institute.

Guidelines for Evaluating Work in Digital Humanities and Digital Media

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Introduction

The following guidelines are designed to help departments and faculty members implement effective evaluation procedures for hiring, reappointment, tenure, and promotion. They apply to scholars working with digital media as their subject matter and to those who use digital methods or whose work takes digital form.

Digital media are transforming literacy, scholarship, teaching, and service, as well as providing new venues for research, communication, and the creation of networked academic communities. Information technology is an integral part of the intellectual environment for all humanities faculty members, but for those working closely in new media it creates special challenges and opportunities. Digital media have expanded the objects and forms of inquiry of modern language departments to include images, sounds, data, kinetic attributes like animation, and new kinds of engagement with textual representation and analysis. These innovations have considerably broadened notions of language, language teaching, text, textual studies, and literary and media objects, the traditional purview of modern language departments.

Short Guide To Evaluation Of Digital Work

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This short guide gathers a collection of questions evaluators can ask about a project, a check list of what to look for in a project, and some ideas about how to find experts in one place. This assumes that evaluators who are assessing digital work for promotion and tenure are:

new to the review of digital scholarly work and therefore could use a framework of questions to start with;
prepared to review the materials submitted by a candidate in the form it was meant to be accessed but need ideas of what to look for; and
will also ask for expert reviews from others and therefore need suggestions on where to look for relevant expertise.

This is an annotated expansion of Evaluating Digital Work (PDF) which was prepared as a one page checklist.

A Call to Redefine Historical Scholarship in the Digital Turn

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_This is a collaboratively-written call for the American Historical Association to appoint a task force to survey the profession as to the place of digital historical scholarship in promotion and tenure and graduate student training and to recommend standards and guidelines for the profession to follow.__This document is a product of many of the exciting changes discussed below. It began at a session at THATCamp AHA 2012 that included graduate students, tenured and non-tenured faculty, and librarians. These participants and others continued their conversations at the physical conference and afterwards on the web. Additional signatures and edits in the _Google Doc were solicited via Twitter, and through posts on Jason’s blog and by Alex on GradHacker.__The letter was then submitted to the American Historical Association’s Research Division on January 26, 2012. On June 2, 2012 the AHA announced the establishment of a Task Force on Digital Scholarship.

Documenting a New Media Case

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_This material was developed by an online open-content collaborative of individuals and groups working to develop a common resource for the profession using an online wiki. _The structure of the project allowed anyone with an Internet connection to alter its content.As such, it does not represent the official positions of the Modern Language Association. The wiki is still available for editing.

Promotion and Tenure for Digital Scholarship

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An Open Letter to the Promotion and Tenure Committee at Texas A&M University, Department of English, upon their request for information about how to evaluate digital work for promotion and tenure.

Evaluating Digital Scholarship

The first thing to do in evaluating digital scholarship is to ask the scholar who has produced it to submit it, if at all possible, for peer review. There are several avenues for doing so. First, any electronic scholarly edition can be submitted to the MLA Scholarly Editions Committee for peer review, and junior faculty should be encouraged to do so. The kinds of editions that will pass peer review by the SCE could be very print-like, so the fact that a digital edition did not receive the SCE seal is not completely indicative of its value as research, about which I’ll say more below. Another venue for peer-reviewing is Nineteenth-century Scholarship Online (NINES) for nineteenth-century electronic scholarship. That NINES model is being expanded: my own 18thConnect peer-reviews eighteenth-century digital projects, and three other peer-reviewing organizations are coming into existence: MESA for medieval, REKn for Renaissance / Early Modern, and ModNets for Modernists.

Evaluating Scholarly Digital Outputs: The Six Layers Approach

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Developing standards to evaluate scholarly digital output is one of the most significant problems our generation of digital humanists can work on. The improvement of tools and methods, the elaboration of theoretical perspectives, and (above all else) the development of digital outputs, will always be of primary importance. The elaboration of evaluation standards, however, has a broader reach: it is part of our responsibility as good scholarly citizens. Regardless of how digital humanities develops in the next few years humanists are going to need quality standards that help us distinguish ‘good’ from ‘bad’ work. In our universities this is primarily connected with the administrative requirements of performance and tenure review, but it goes much further than that.

Evaluating Multimodal Work, Revisited

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Two years ago I was preparing for a semester in which all of my classes involved “multimodal” student work — that is, theoretically-informed, research-based work that resulted in something _other_than a traditional paper. For years I’d been giving students in my classes the option of submitting, for at least one of their semester assignments, a media production or creative project (accompanied by a support paper in which they addressed how their work functioned as “scholarship”) — but given that this cross-platform work would now become the norm, I thought I should take some time to think about how to fairly and helpfully evaluate these projects. How do we know what’s good?

Evaluating Digital Humanities Work: Guidelines for Librarians

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In this piece, Zach Coble explores the benefits of creating guidelines for the evaluation of librarians’ digital humanities work for the purposes of hiring, appointment, tenure, and promotion, and offers a basic framework for what those guidelines might look like.

Digital humanities, as well as related fields such digital media studies and digital libraries, have presented many opportunities for libraries. These include the establishment of digital humanities centers, the development of new data standards, new forms of scholarly communication, the creation of new resources (and novel ways of asking questions of those resources), and the development of new tools for scholarship and accessing collections.¹ However, traditional modes of evaluation do not address many of the key aspects of digital humanities work.

Let the Grant Do the Talking

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On December 3, 2012 I spent a day talking with a community arts organization, the New Urban Arts Center, that takes a different approach to their arts education and humanities-driven mission than most arts and humanities funders are accustomed to supporting. We talked about the ways that the organization constantly needs to explain its process-driven approach to art to those not intimately involved at the Center. In doing so, they are educating supporters and funders to their humanities-driven educational community praxis.

Tenure as a Risk-Taking Venture

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I want to offer some context about my particular experience with tenure and promotion, because George Mason University (GMU) has a new tenure policy that allows candidates to go up for tenure either on the basis of “genuine excellence in research” or “genuine excellence in teaching.” In either situation, the other criteria are also held to a high standard (for example, “genuine excellence in teaching” also demands “highly competent research”).

Explaining Digital Humanities in Promotion Documents

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In preparing my tenure and promotion dossier I was advised that I needed to explain my fields and contextualize my work in a more accessible way. Without many models for doing this, I made up my own rules, then tore apart my dossier, then re-assembled it, then tore it apart again (this happened 3 more times), then revised my narratives (this happened 6 more times). I received some well-meaning but conflicting advice and ultimately had to make up my own mind about how best to sell Digital Humanities, scholarly editing, and Digital Pedagogy to my colleagues. I received much help from the twitter-verse, but I really wish that a storehouse or consulting arena existed for this kind of professional documentation. As a Digital Humanist, I do so much that’s ephemeral but integral to my work. This is true with Digital Pedagogy and scholarly editing, too.

Evaluating Digital Scholarship: Experiences in New Programmes at an Irish University

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While we have used digital research in teaching at University College Cork for many years, the central role played by digital artefacts in the new Digital Humanities programmes is a relatively recent addition. This pivotal shift is new for both staff and students who, by the nature of new media technologies, cannot benefit from generations of received wisdom on assessment and evaluation. In this piece, we undertake a frank and personal investigation from both a pedagogical and scholarly perspective.