‘Digital humanities’ and ‘digital scholarship.’ To many, this distinction may seem pointless or premature but I’ve been struggling to articulate what that distinction is. Why? Because after bookmarking a ton of sites, (anywhere from Centers’ & Studios’ project websites to the personal & professional blogs of digital humanists), I’m finding that the range is so broad in humanities computing, that a distinction is called for. Besides, scholarship evokes something specific, namely – finding an answer to a question or resolving a contradiction using the dialectical method. Digital scholarship, in my opinion, should maintain its dialectic character but should also be experimental with the digital format in terms of how it establishes and, more importantly for this post, propels that dialog forward.
I think one reason that traditional, print-based, scholarship is hard to move away from – why it’s hard not to make it the baseline for evaluation other forms of scholarship (performance, scholarly digital experimentation, etc.) is that its evaluation process helps it to fit quite nicely within the parameters set by definitions of the dialectical method. According to Wikipedia, “Scholarly peer review is the process of subjecting an author’s scholarly work, research, or ideas to the scrutiny of others who are experts in the same field [that presumably hold different viewpoints about a subject], before a paper describing this work is published in a journal. The work may be accepted, considered acceptable with revisions, or rejected. Peer review requires a community of experts in a given (and often narrowly defined) field, who are qualified and able to perform impartial review.”
I would argue that projects like http://whitneyannetrettien.com/thesis/ are the part of the future of digital scholarship and I also think calling this example work ‘scholarship’ makes some feel uncomfortable. Why? Does it make a reasoned argument? I think so, yes. Does the format and the content imply an invitation for dialog? I think so, yes. There aren’t many things like Treitten’s that I’ve found. And I’m not saying that I think she’s the greatest writer or that her arguments are mind-blowing or mabye they are - the argument itself is not the point. The point is that she presents a reasoned argument, that the presentation is visually & functionally creative, and that her platform is the web – what’s not dialectical about that combination?
So mabye the question is ‘dialog with whom?’ Is it speaking to a narrow field of qualified experts? What field? History of Science? Humanities computing? Computer science? Literature? If we aren’t sure what field to classify it under, (partly due to the platform – are we readers or are we users), then who is qualified to review it – who is invited to participate in the dialog that gets at the truth of the matter? And does the scholarly peer review process fail when you check the box that says ‘all of the above.’
My point is: We should allow digital scholarship to mean something fundamentally different and its evaluation process should reflect that. Alternatives to peer review and peer review in electronic publishing have been written about for a more than a decade and are still being written about, but still in the context of the journal article.*(1, 2, 3)
Okay, so what do I think digital scholarship should look like: well, first I would say that future of digital scholarlship should look a little more like what Trettien is doing (ie, not just an essay, not just a website, not just a visualization, not just a performance, it’s all of these things on the same page) than say, an article in First Monday, (although First Monday is a consistent source of engaging scholarship about the most relevant topics in the feild of information studies and beyond). But aside from that, it needs its own evaluation process - negotiated by people doing the work. The idea of a process being negotiated by the digital scholars themselves, instead of by the scholarly community at large is most obviously because they have a vested interest in making sure that the field continues to gain respect/scholarly heft or whatever else you want to call it. Another reason I’ll offer up is that a process can be adapted to work in different contexts but sometimes even after investing considerable overhead in ‘making it work’, it can still fall short of doing what it’s intended to do well.
Excuse my ramblings. This is an ongoing thought exercise for me.
*1.Fitzpatrick, K. (2010). Peer-to-peer Review and the Future of Scholarly Authority. Social Epistemology, 24(3), 161-179. doi:10.1080/02691728.2010.498929
2.First Monday, Volume 4, Number 4 – 5 April 1999,Scholarly Publishing, Peer Review and the Internet by Peter Roberts
3.Differences & Repetitions Wiki, August 25, 2010, Performing Scholarly Communication by Ted Striphas
