Tuesday, March 11, 2014

Week 8: Credit and Assessment II

  • Should graduate students in a DH class care about tenure and promotion issues in digital humanities as they are relevant to faculty? How might these be relevant considerations even if you are not planning to be a professor?
  • What general principles for evaluating digital scholarship can we extract from these readings? What principles for evaluating quality? For professional promotion purposes?
  • How do the criteria raised in these articles compare to those we have been using to assess websites and tools in this class?


Todd Pressner, “How to Evaluate Digital Scholarship,” Journal of Digital Humanities 1(4) (2012): http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/1-4/how-to-evaluate-digital-scholarship-by-todd-presner/
  • Historians as involved in “the design of the interface,” itself an intellectual contribution at the birth of a new form of conveying ideas. Do you accept this principle? In the digital websites that we have looked at so far, which have contributed new designs that should be credited as new platforms?
  • Is any of the commentary in these articles relevant to public history, and how credit and promotion works in public history?
  • What is the role of “risk taking” in credit and promotion?


Geoffrey Rockwell, “Short Guide to Evaluation of Digital Work,” Journal of Digital Humanities 1 (4) (2012): http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/1-4/short-guide-to-evaluation-of-digital-work-by-geoffrey-rockwell/
  • Why is it so important to review work in the medium it was intended to be viewed in? What might this be an obstacle for some history departments?
  • Why is discussion of the merits of design so important for digital projects and so unimportant for consideration with respect to promotion of book and article authors?


James Smithies, “Evaluating Scholarly Digital Outputs: The Six Layers Approach,” Journal of Digital Humanities 1 (4) (2012): http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/1-4/evaluating-scholarly-digital-outputs-by-james-smithies/
  • What is this typology useful for?


Laura Mandell, “Promotion and Tenure for Digital Scholarship,” Journal of Digital Humanities 1 (4) (2012): http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/1-4/promotion-and-tenure-for-digital-scholarship-by-laura-mandell/
  • “Most e-books might as well be books. In fact, it would be a lot more convenient if they were: the printed codex never needs to be recharged.”
  • How can you make a decision about whether to push your project through print or digital publication channels? What factors should you take into consideration?
  • What is “curation”? Why are academic scholars taking on this task? Does this tendency help or hurt museum professionals, who are more traditionally curators?
  • “If one defines research in the digital humanities as discovering and creating resources that empower people, direct tasks, and structure information according to articulated and articulable humanities principles.” What do you think research is?


Katherine D. Harris, “Explaining Digital Humanities in Promotion Documents,” Journal of Digital Humanities 1 (4): 2012: http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/1-4/explaining-digital-humanities-in-promotion-documents-by-katherine-harris/
  • Do you know what a tenure and promotion portfolio looks like?
  • She argues for the recognition of her blog as a key piece of her scholarship, including by  counting the number of times links to it were tweeted. What do you think of this line of argument?


AHA, NCPH, OAH, “Tenure, Promotion, and the Publicly Engaged Academic Historian,” http://ncph.org/cms/wp-content/uploads/Engaged-Historian.pdf
  • What is the significance of a jointly released document?
  • What do these standards have to do with digital history?

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