Scholarship and Digital Humanities
Thursday, May 29th, 2008 | Margie
I mentioned this in my earlier post–there are many faculty grappling with how to define and evaluate the quality of applied, public, collaborative, and/or digital scholarship. The digital work takes many forms including publishing a monograph as an electronic book, developing research tools and models, blogging, building Web resources for education, and producing public projects like Mark’s Euclid Corridor Oral History Project in Cleveland. I’ve written about this a bit on Tellhistory. I would like first to learn, from those more directly involved, about broader digital humanities initiatives on this front and to discuss what more needs to be done. When departments with public history graduate programs do not recognize traditional peer-reviewed print publications about public history as scholarship — it seems like there is a lot that needs to be done to support the greater emphasis on methodology, collaboration, and organization that Tom Scheinfeldt addressed in “Sunset for Ideology, Sunrise for Methodology?”
May 29th, 2008 at 11:21 am
I’m starting to sound like a broken record, but I am interested in this too. I’m coming at it from a bit of a different angle- I’m a library student and may or may not end up with a tenure position, but I hope to be part of interdisciplinary teams to help scholars (and students!) with digital projects. So I’d like to know what to say when asked “well, will this count towards tenure?” or “will my teacher regard a digital project as highly as a traditional paper?” The answer, of course, will be different for each situation, but I think the more stories and ideas I hear, the more I’ll be able to help such people make their cases for digital scholarship.
May 29th, 2008 at 7:41 pm
I have much to say about this, and have recently gone from optimism to pessimism about the future of scholarly communication in a digital age. Some good pre-camp reading:
cshe.berkeley.edu/publications/publications.php?id=300
May 29th, 2008 at 8:20 pm
There is a growing realization in the archaeological community that the job is not done until the report is written and the data is shared with tax paying public that funds such work. As both a historian and an archaeologist I have increasingly wondered why publicly funded historians get a pass on the obligation for public outreach. “That’s the public historian’s job” some might argue. Personally I think that argument is weak. Why can’t historians write their scholarly works and make an effort to share that information with the public? No, it won’t get you tenure…now, but in the days of tighter funding, projects at public universities that engage a public audience provide tangible reasons for supporting university programs.
While this may not be the popular (or realistic some would say) position I believe the work of digital historians is a step in that direction by virtue of the more accessible nature of online projects. Even just reaching a broader age range of students is an excellent start. It is in the best interests of the field and I hope it’s a trend that continues. If my dissertation adviser can say to me “explain why we should care about your dissertation topic, why is it relevant,” I believe the public should ask the same question.
March 9th, 2010 at 4:09 am
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