On the Origin of “Hack” and “Yack”

Sun, 01 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

One of the least helpful constructs of our “digital humanities” moment has been a supposed active opposition, drawn out over the course of years in publications, presentations, and social media conversation, between two inane-sounding concepts: “hack” and “yack.” The heralding of digital humanities as the academy’s “next big thing” has been (depending on whom you ask) over-due or overblown, unexpected or contrived, refreshing or retrograde—but one thing is clear: everyone has a rhetorical use for it. The uses of “hack vs. yack,” on the other hand, rapidly became so one-sided that I find it odd the phrase retains any currency for critique.

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

Sat, 01 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Bnowviskie on Journal of Digital Humanities

On the Origin of “Hack” and “Yack”

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