Yesterday, on the University of Washington's Seattle campus, our local group of HASTAC scholars facilitated a conversation on "Evaluating Digital Scholarship: Expertise, Storage, Design." 

I was glad to see a wide array of folks (from various departments and programs) attend.  Now, a day after the event, it strikes me that the question of where digital scholarship is stored (and how it's stored) especially resonated with the group, as well as the question of what are the standards for digital scholarship. 

And I know "standards" can be off-putting for some; nevertheless, there's a lot to be learned about them from the work of Susan Leigh Star, Geoffrey Bowker, and others in the field of Science and Technology Studies.  Put pithily, standards (e.g., metadata standards) aren't static or inflexible.  Of course, they change over time, and those of us who are engaged in digital scholarship might gain a lot from studying how, exactly, standards emerge and how they affect our respective fields, not to mention our everyday lives (for better or worse). 

For instance, yesterday, we spent most of our time discussing hypermedia scholarship (e.g., a blend of video, audio, images, and text) and the challenges such publications pose not just to evaluation, but also to archivists.  What's the shelf life or work life of hypermedia?  How will it be accessed in twenty years, where is it being deposited, and according to what guidelines? 

At MLA 2009, I spoke to these issues a touch, looking at my dissertation-in-progress as a working example.  Initially,  I was thinking of adding a digital component to my proto-print dissertation; however, now I am making two versions: one web-based, one print-based (each with different content and designs).  In so doing, I want offer a portable platform for composing digital dissertations (in the humanities), one that abides by archival standards and encoding guidelines and could be used by others, who (like me) are asking what a digital dissertation looks like, how it's designed to perform an argument, and---indeed---where and how it would be stored or deposited (with a library, for instance). 

And sure: that means that, for some folks, the content of the dissertation would be of no interest.  Fair enough.  That's really nothing new. Point being: creating contexts for others to produce scholarship is (or should be) as rewarding as producing more content in a given field.  (Think Omeka here.) 

That said, right now, I'm wondering about a few things, and I'd love to hear what others are thinking along the same lines:

What role, if any, do standards (e.g., metadata standards) play in your field?  Your individual or collaborative work?  And how do they intersect with how you compose/write? 

What does (or might) your critical approach to standards look like?  What is (or would be) its goals?  How does (or would) it simultaneously acknowledge the need for standards, what they historically tend to ignore or elide, and the ways in which systematicity is sutured to sets of contigent practices? 

Doctoral students: What's the form of your dissertation?  Are you considering a digital dissertation or digital components?  Why or why not? 

How do standards involve a template, and to what effects on scholarship?  (Ack!?  Templates!?)

Right now, for a project entitled, "Standards in the Making," I'm collaborating with Matthew Wilson (qualitative GIS, Ball State), James J. Bono (rhetoric and cultural studies, University of Pittsburgh), and Curtis Hisayasu (American Studies, University of Washington) on a digital publication that is unpacking questions like those above.  Since each of us is invested in a different field, we've quickly come to one realization: there are a lot of answers.

Let's welcome them all.

As a profession, humanists have not done a good job of making a case for our centrality, we have not taken our own mission responsibly and seriously enough.  Some programs do this much better than other.  Some disciplines do this much better than others.  I'm generalizing, and I hope departments that have faced the challenges well will respond with their examples in the comment section below.  It would be great for all of us to be able to learn from these models.  We need them now.

With all the talk of the importance of the digital humanities at MLA I'm surprised there hasn't already been a post here on the subject of Brian Croxall. Brian, a visiting assistant professor in the Department of English at Clemson University, decided to present his paper at MLA by proxy as a combination stunt-protest over the catastrophic job market...

One field seems to be alive and well: the digital humanities.

This blog entry (not a HASTAC blog) is a list of all of the upcoming 2009 MLA sessions related to new media and the digital humanities. You may also be interested in following the Digital Humanities/MLA list on Twitter.

http://www.samplereality.com/2009/11/15/digital-humanities-sessions-at-the-2009-mla/

I was very excited today to receive the email from Rosemary Feal, Executive Director of MLA, announcing the unveiling of the Evaluation Wiki, an online Wiki for "The Evaluation of Digital Work."  It is part of the MLA's Committee on Information Technology, and allows any teacher or scholar to contribute to it, offering content on developing, gathering, and sharing material about the evaluation of digital work for hiring, tenure, promotion, and other rewards of our profession.  HASTAC has been writing about this for a long time but never came up with an idea this brilliant, to make it a wiki.   We're honored to be mentioned as part of this project and we here invite all HASTAC members to contribute.  

INSIDE HIGHER ED's Scott Jaschik has written an excellent summary of the HASTAC/MLA Taskforce on Tenure in a Digital Era being spearheaded by HASTAC SC member Tim Murray amd HASTAC new member (and new leader--it's the HASTAC way!) Laura Mandell of Miami of Ohio. HASTAC is teaming up with MLA to come up with constructive guidelines for how to evaluate digital scholarship. Here's the url for this great piece, and hats off to Tim and Laura for both making this happen and getting publicity. Spreading the word is half the battle---so pass it on! http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/05/26/digital

 

We will be building on a wiki already in progress and already full of useful information, documents, stories, suggestions, guidelines. You can find that here: http://www.philosophi.ca/pmwiki.php/Main/MLADigitalWork

Times change: print no longer default MLA citation style

The Modern Language Association's (MLA) new handbook for academic citations does away with the primacy of print, along with the need to include URLs for Web citations. All hail the rise of the Internet.

Reporting from the conference of the Modern Language Association. This is technically my December vlog!

Matthew K. Gold and John Jones appear in the video.

Song: http://allmyinternetfriends.com by Amanda French

There is a 40 minute video of the panel "Humanities 2.0: Participatory Learning in an Age of Technology" at http://j-l-r.org/media/MLAsmall.mov