Digital Scholarship Update

T. Mills Kelly, author of thought-provoking, extended essays on teaching, has begun a new series, Making Digital Scholarship Count on his blog, edwired.

Cathy Davidson shared her thoughts in “Should Digital Scholarship Count for Tenure?” on her HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory) blog. Davidson’s response seems to be a very, very qualified yes:

I’m not sure I believe in the broad-stroke category “digital scholarship” especially when people are talking about “counting for tenure.” I’m not sure I know what it means, even, or what is implied by such an undifferentiated category. I don’t believe “scholarship,” in and of itself, should always count for tenure. There’s a whole range of value in a word like “scholarship.” So, by extension, I can’t simply say that “digital scholarship” should or should not count. As with all factors leading to tenure, it depends on whether it is good or not. And “good” is not very easy to define.

A lively discussion, well worth reading, followed in the comments on her essay.

I’ve served on promotion committees in other departments and as an outside evaluator for other universities so I’ve seen first hand diverse approaches to promotion decisions. I admire the departments, like the Department of English at Miami University, that take a rigorous approach to evaluating teaching as well as scholarship. Some departments explicitly count, assigning point values to all kinds of things. My department counts although with far less precision than some others. Monographs, biography, edited volumes, and textbooks all have their place. Peer-reviewed articles about public history and history education along with grant-funded projects of any size ($500-$1,000,000) all apparently fall into a catchall along with book reviews and encyclopedia entries, as evidence of continuing scholarly activity but not substantive work. While in the applied sciences and engineering, a peer-reviewed article about applied research is substantive, in history it falls into that catchall. In this regard, historians fail to support the development of public history, history education, and digital history.

However, counting is the first hurdle; value should be the crucial consideration. Value is traditionally determined by peer-review in at least two points in the process — the peer-review of articles and manuscripts for publication and the peer-review by outside evaluators and members of one’s own department in the promotion decision. There are also book reviews and awards.

Government funded grants are also peer-reviewed and increasingly grant projects are extensively scrutinized in both formative and summative evaluations. In contrast to the peer-review of print scholarship, the evaluations on grant projects are also open to public scrutiny.

This issue aside, we do need to build the institutional framework to recognize quality in digital humanities (as well as the scholarship of civic engagement). Academic journals have become more receptive than many departments; both reviews and full-length articles about public and digital history are not so unusual. A colleague at THATCAMP proposed an American Historical Review style journal of digital humanities to examine in-depth significant digital productions and innovative digital tools as well as to provide evidence of peer-review for this work. The work in digital humanities and public history is exciting and it makes a difference in our profession as well as in the schools and in the quality of our lives. However, the long standing presence of the National Council for Public History and the organization’s journal Public Historian have not yet produced the recognition for public history scholarship. While departments will continue to assign this peer-reviewed work to the catchall (or dustbin) for a decade, we need some optimism that “if we build it, they will come” around.