Week 7: Peer Review and Credit

Sheila Cavanagh, “Living in a Digital World: Rethinking Peer Review, Collaboration, and Open Access,” Journal of Digital Humanities 1 (4): http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/1-4/living-in-a-digital-world-by-sheila-cavanagh/

• Addresses contextual problem of failure to recognize digital work
• What are the reasons for tenured folks not understanding how to give credit for digital work in the academic reward system?
• Do you accept the suggestion that peer review is as much about marking the status as about determining the quality of a work of scholarship?
• Do you think of public history projects as scholarship? What distinction, if any, would you offer?
• What dynamics of power and status does Cavanagh identify as relevant to institutional support for DH projects?
• If DH projects are inherently collaborative, what should peer review look like? I wonder how scientists conduct peer review when there are hundreds of co-authors on any given article.
• What problems in grant applications do scholars from underresourced institutions face?
• Is developing partnerships for digital projects really a form of peer review?
• Review steps of traditional peer review and compare to what happens in a digital project.
• What are the consequences of not encouraging junior faculty to publish on the web?
• What implications for faculty acceptance of non-traditional DH projects are there for graduate students?
• Are any of these considerations relevant for public history?

Bethany Nowviske, “Evaluating Collaborative Digital Scholarship (Or, Where Credit is Due),” Journal of Digital Humanities 1 (4): http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/1-4/evaluating-collaborative-digital-scholarship-by-bethany-nowviskie/

• What assumptions about collaboration inform traditional humanities views of promotion and credit?
• What’s the difference between evaluating output and evaluating process?
• What are the systems of production and reception that Nowviske describes?
• What do they mean when they say digital scholarship is rarely done?
• “technical partners and so-called “non-academic” co-creators”: what ideas are loaded into this phrasing?
• What is “alt-ac” and how is it relevant to Nowviske’s discussion?
• What kind of peer review takes place in digital projects? How constant peer review of participants different from traditional peer review?
• “take pains to avoid implying that collaboration in digital humanities is merely a means of enhancing a privileged faculty member’s ability to make informed decisions or more sophisticated authorial and directorial choices.”
• What’s the difference between credit through co-authorship and credit through listing on a DH site?

Kristen Nawrotski and Jack Dougherty, “Introduction,” in Writing History in the Digital Age, http://quod.lib.umich.edu/d/dh/12230987.0001.001/1:3/--writing-history-in-the-digital-age?g=dculture;rgn=div1;view=fulltext;xc=1

• What differences did they set out to make in the process of creating a collection?
• How did their approach to peer review differ from traditional peer review? What are the potential up- and downsides of this approach?
• Would you feel free to write in this way, in public? Would you write some things in public but not others?
• Why did they use the Creative Commons License?
• As students, would you prefer to write more publicly?
• “In practice, faculty members effectively give away journal and book manuscripts to publishers for the privilege of seeing them in print. In turn, publishers sell faculty scholarship back to our academic libraries and charge them a price for the right to lend out print copies or disseminate digital copies on proprietary databases.” What do you think about this claim? How would the academy look different if ideas were literally freely circulated?
• “Our jaws dropped over a year ago when a major publisher listed a colleague’s hardcover historical monograph at $95. That copyrighted text is effectively locked inside a very expensive box that very few can afford, and the author has no legal recourse to let it out.”
• What are the reasons many of us continue to prefer books?
• What are the potential downsides of continuous 2-way communication about our publications? Why isn’t email good enough a medium to permit that?
• List of criteria that make their web book format desirable: Look Like a Book, Protect Authors’ Attribution Rights While Maximizing Public Access, Integrate Narrative Text and Multimedia Source Materials; Speed Up Distribution While Preserving Archival and Print Formats; Be Findable with Existing Library Search Tools; Promote Peer Review with Two-Way Scholarly Communication
• What does it matter when peer review takes place?
• What differences might there be between a multi-author volume like this one and a full-length monograph that went through a layer of public peer review while in process?
• How might these ideas translate to preparation of museum exhibits?

Jack Dougherty, Kristen Nawrotzki, Charlotte D. Rochez, and Timothy Burke, “Conclusions: What We Learned from Writing History in the Digital Age,” in writing History in the Digital Age, http://quod.lib.umich.edu/d/dh/12230987.0001.001/1:10/--Wwriting-history-in-the-digital-age?g=dculture;rgn=div1;view=fulltext;xc=1#10.3

• What is the significance of having their final version published away from the in-process comments?
• In what ways does this essay function as a conclusion?
• What strategies did they use to cultivate participation? Would this work as an ongoing strategy, or was the novelty key?
• What do you think is the significance of the extent of the public peer review response?
• Is it plausible that the academy will reward participation in peer review?
• Why invite “expert” reviewers into the process? Who counts as an expert?