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?

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?

Session 6: transitioning forward

Cohen and Rosenzweig, chapters 7, 8, and conclusion

• What is Creative Commons? What are its implications for scholarship?
• What is copyright? How does copyright protect you, frustrate you, as a historian? What is fair use?
• How are sites like Facebook, Instagram, etc., dealing with copyright and images?
• How do you feel about copyright? Alternatives? Is open access an alternative?
• Copyright is a big complicated mess. If you were creating a digital history project, for a class, say, what should you do: 1) about copyrighting the project and 2) about any primary sources you wanted to include?
• What are the takeaways from this chapter for you?
• Should we seriously worry that historical study will be impossible in the future?

Kelly, chapter 5 and conclusion

• Do we agree with Kelly’s implicit suggestion that digital history = online history?
• Do you want your professors to add online components to your classes? What if the cost is reduced skills that are the traditional goals of graduate classes, like close reading, analysis, and understanding of the past?
• “While historians might be tempted to scoff at such mash-ups and remixes as ahistorical or simply silly, the popularity of such work cannot be denied.” Is this a good argument? Where does “popularity” fit into history professors’ goals?
• Are we content to do “thought experiments” such as the Tank Man video Kelly discusses?
• What do you think of the “Lying about the Past” course?
• Given the intentionality of the hoax, let’s revisit how we know whether to trust online sources.
• Given how long things last on the internet (long or short?), was it a reasonable assumption that the class could really “take down” the hoax at the end of the class?
• Idea of “zombie facts”
• How can you give grades in a course like Lying about the Past?
• What do you think of the decision of the GMU department that Kelly could not continue to teach the Lying about the past class?

Questions for going forward

• What do we know now about how to think about digital history that we didn’t know at the start of the semester? What questions do we have now that we did not formerly have?
• Let’s try to construct the steps you need to build a Digital History project
• Brainstorm possible projects and paper questions

Flaw in the course plan

I've figured out one of the things that I should be doing differently in this class. Too much of our talk about digital history is abstracted from real world experience. We need to have more doing of digital history built into the course from the beginning.

Session 5: Matching Historical Goals and Presentation

I have been pulling up the blog in class so that the questions are available during discussion. However, because the question list is too long and we often have other material up on screen, they have not had the effect of spontaneously directing classroom discussion.

Readings:

• Kelly, Teaching History in the Digital Age, chapter 4
• Leah Wright, “Tweet Me a Story,” in Web Writing: Why & How for Liberal Arts Teaching & Learning, edited by Jack Dougherty et al., http://webwriting.trincoll.edu/engagement/wright-2013/
• Shannon Chistine Mattern, “Evaluating Multimodal Work, Revisited,” Journal of Digital Humanities 1 (4): http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/1-4/evaluating-multimodal-work-revisited-by-shannon-mattern/
• Cohen and Rosenzweig, chapter 6

Overriding question: The internet offers us so many options for presenting and gaining historical information. How do we know which ones to use? Goal of class discussion: develop criteria for thinking about how to answer this question.

Cohen and Rosenzweig, chapter 6

• What methods can you use to figure out what research collection approaches match your intent?
• What questions should we be asking about the reliability of witness testimony collected through online sites? Are such questions any different than those we would ask about oral histories or archived documentary history?
• What are the takeaways in terms of advice about when you build your own digital collecting project?

Tweet Me a Story

• What did you learn about how Twitter works from this essay? What are the strengths and weaknesses of how Twitter works?
• Why did one student in the class refer to the essay as a blog? What’s the difference between a blog and an essay?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of Twitter as a platform for telling a longer story?
• Does carefully organizing tweets into a story, perhaps with posts from other media included, undermine the instant-gratification effects of Twitter?
• What role might Twitter, and storytelling through Twitter, have in history in particular?
• What effect does the author gain by invoking the historical practice of serialization of novels in magazines before being sold in book format?

Kelly, chapter 4

• In this age of so many possibilities for presenting your historical information and ideas, how do you know which one (or sequence) to use?
• Should we be asking students to write in a variety of forms (such as Tweeting) or should we defend the value of the traditional linear essay? What have you gained from the traditional linear, analytical essay? What are its essential virtues? Can we make a comparison to practicing your scales if you are a piano player—you shouldn’t venture out into these other formats unless you have the basic approach down?
• Why are/were grades private? Is public feedback on a work in progress more motivating? Is my reluctance to share work in progress born from a perfectionism characteristic of those very people who go on to become professors? Should student projects have a life after the end of a class?
• Have I made the goals of the class blogs sufficiently clear? What are the pros and cons of the blogging platforms that you have started up your blogs on?

Evaluating Multimodal Work

• Would you feel comfortable using these criteria to, say, assess the work of students in Mills Kelly’s class?
• Do all of these criteria seem to apply to student work? What kind of student work is she talking about?

Session 4: A lot of content and a lot of users

 This week we will be talking about the problem of the web: there are so many websites and so many potential audience members. How do we relate to them and each other?

The readings are:

·         Kelly, TeachingHistory in the Digital Age, chapter 3

·         Roy Rosenzweig, “Scarcity or Abundance: Preserving the Past in a Digital Era.” American Historical Review 108 (3) (2003): 735-762.

·         Alisea Williams McLeod, “Student Digital Research and Writing on Slavery: Problems and Possibilities,” in Web Writing: Why & How for Liberal Arts Teaching & Learning, edited by Jack Dougherty et al., http://webwriting.trincoll.edu/crossing-boundaries/student-digital-research-and-writing-on-slavery-problems-and-possibilities/

·         Cohen and Rosenzweig,chapter 5 

Kelly, chapter 3

• What does it mean to suggest that documents “read each other”? What are the valences of the word “recombinant”?
• What are the differences between the HTML and XML markup examples (presidential speeches)? What does Kelly say is the significance of those differences?
• What kinds of problems does the abundance of digital primary sources create for historians? How can we keep track of all the sources we can find, much less read and analyze them all?
• Tools like JSTOR as more than just repositories for keeping track of journals, but potentially offering a powerful, new kind of search that will create juxtapositions of sources we could not easily bring together on our own.
• How much is an “exabyte”?
• Is this comment overblown: “being able to use machine methods for making sense of this massive database of historical text is no longer a luxury—it is an imperative.” Are our goals as historians and teachers of history about accessing the past through every possible route, or about understanding what we are capable of understanding? Does it matter, if (for example), I can’t use quantitative analysis or read a non-English language? Are these tools simply expanding the range of what some of us can do, or are they placing new imperatives on us for the central tasks of historical understanding?
• “Software still cannot analyze text in all the ways a historian would, but it can suggest interesting starting points for that analysis, and with each passing year the text mining and analysis algorithms get better and better.” This passage suggests that historians need to learn to skirt back and forth between mining data and reading evidence. Do we need to teach data mining in graduate school? To undergraduate history majors?

Rosenzweig, “Scarcity or Abundance?”

• What are the problems of scarcity and abundance that we face in the digital age?
• What are the problems involved in preserving the digital record? What are the problems of interpreting in the digital record?
• What kinds of gaps in historical evidence can you recall having run into in your own research?
• Are we likely ever to encounter “an essentially complete historical record”?
• Will the students in the class who are also in SOIS talk about what they know about the preservation of digital records?
• The problem of ownership of digital records. How does private ownership affect your ability to access sources?
• What does this comment about the Pitt Project mean: it “broadens the role of archives and archivists through its focus on ‘records as evidence’ rather than ‘information’”? What is the distinction between information and evidence being made here?
• What would you do if historical research were “disintermediated”? What is the ongoing role of libraries and especially archives?

Alisea Williams McLeod, Student Digital Research and Writing on Slavery: Problems and Possibilities, Web Writing

• How does this faculty member take advantage of the abundance of digital resources to transform her students’ learning experiences?
• “I believe that a new infusion of history into American culture—through digitization and social media—may raise an issue of our students’ rights to their own temporality as we increase their exposure to controversial, historical documents.” What might she mean by this? How might her field—Rhetoric and Composition—encourage practitioners to think about time in a different way than historians approach it?
• Why would the chance to share their research with the public through the internet incentivize students to continue their involvement beyond the period of the semester?
• “ongoing digitization of historic records like the ROF make it all but inevitable that not only they but the entire world will soon have to confront problems and possibilities that come from widespread re-infusion of the historical.” Given what our other authors suggest about the problem of abundance, is it likely that digitization of historical records will encourage everyone to think about the past more? Or will we be overwhelmed?

Cohen and Rosenzweig, chapter 5

• We have a potentially abundant audience—but how can we find it and let it know about our projects?
• Do you feel a reluctance to build an audience, or a lack of knowledge about how to do so?
• What do you think about the ideas for DH website promotion that DC&RR discuss? What opportunities do they omit because they were not available when the book was published in 2006?
• When should you work on the publicity for your project?
• How will you know if your site is being well used?

Session 3

Cohen and Rosenzweig, chapters 2, 3, and 4

Kelly, chapter 2

Ø  DC&RR open chapter 2 by pointing out the existence of subtle clues in the physical makeup of books that tell us about the history of the project, clues that animate how we think about them as we read them. Let’s enumerate them for:

Ø  Traditional books and articles

Ø  Digital history projects

Ø  53: are DC & RR really opposed to “planning ahead” for DH projects?

Ø  What did you learn from the discussion of “getting started” about particular approaches to solving technical problems? Does this part of the book stand the test of time?

Ø  How does the availability of primary sources on the internet affect the way you conduct research?

Ø  What are the strengths and weaknesses of various approaches to digitization of primary sources that you have encountered?

Ø  How does the technology allow new and different historical questions to be asked and answered?

Ø  OCR: example of Joe Austin and ProQuest

Ø  Terms: metadata

Ø  Is it worthwhile trying to distinguish a digital history project and a digital archival project?

Ø  What did you learn about design from DC&RR’s discussion?

Kelly

Ø  What is “real historical research”?

Ø  What strategies do you use for search? Do you start history paper research differently than daily curiosity research?

Ø  How do you handle the problem of search abundance?

Ø  Terms: Dublin Core

Ø  How do the skills Kelly advocates for teaching search literacy gibe with and diverge from what you know about basic historical literacy?

Ø  Do you agree with Kelly about the sustained value of going to chat with the history liaison librarian?