Tag: DH

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Credibility and value of DH projects

In the present academic world peer review is essential: first for scholars and their careers because peer-reviewed articles count for promotion and grants; second for all the interested people, like students, librarians, journalists, and for other scholars, due to the sort of quality that peer review assures to research. However, if this system works well for print scholarship, can it also be applied to digital scholarship? How to validate the quality and credibility of Digital Humanities projects?

In the article Rethinking Peer Review in the Age of Digital Humanities[1] Roopika Risam shows the difference between print and digital scholarships. Digital projects, unlike articles and books, are often collaborative, rarely finished and frequently public: these three aspects prevent a total application of the traditional peer review system. However, a kind of review and quality recognition is needed by DH scholars, especially by the junior ones who are asked to produce peer-reviewed works in order to build an academic career. As Sheila Cavanagh states, peer review is a key aspect to achieve reputation, opportunities and grants in academia and often forces graduate students and junior scholars to sacrifice their DH projects to spend more time producing more prestigious and recognised works, like articles and book chapters.[2] Sadly, in many faculties DH projects don’t receive the same consideration of publications, not taking into account the amount of labour behind a single CV line reporting a DH project.

According to Risam, new review standards should be created, different from the traditional ones because of the different nature of the two scholarships. She suggests metrics like tracking citations and usage statistics to evaluate digital projects: even though they are important indicators, in my opinion they don’t fully assure the quality of the content. Looking for new ways to transfer and adapt peer review to DH projects, I would like to analyse two solutions:

  1. The Advanced Research Consortium (ARC) Nodes: NINES, 18thConnect, MESA, ModNets, SiRO

    ARC has created a mechanism of scholarly peer review to evaluate digital resources and archives which has been adapted to different studies or periods. MESA is built for scholars and researchers of Medieval studies; 18thConnect focuses on the long 18th-century (1660-1820), British and American; NINES concerns the long 19th-century (1770-1920), British and American; ModNets embraces the field of modernist literary and cultural studies, whereas SiRO devotes itself to archival resources for the study of radicalism.
    All these sister organisations adopt the same tools and infrastructures, and the same peer review schema. Submitted projects should have integrity, clear conceptual design and a certain amount of content, even if they don’t have to be completed. The peer-review process requires the submission of a document with information about the project’s structure, its technical dependencies, mission and plans for the future, as well as the submission of metadata describing the objects within the resource in the form of RDF. Then the project is evaluated by an editorial board made up of the most respected scholars in the field. The projects are evaluated on the basis of two questions: the first “is the content important and interested to existing scholarship?” analyses the intellectual content and originality of the resource, thus falling back in the traditional concept of peer review; the second one “is the material presented in a clear, accessible, well-organized and well-documented fashion?” aims attention at the technical structure, the adherence to standards developed by the DH community (like TEI), the interface designs and interoperability.
    This kind of peer review benefits a DH project in a number of ways because the editorial board guarantees its intellectual quality and validates it as equivalent to a print publication. This means that the work of a DH scholar can be fairly weighted also by faculty members without any knowledge in Digital Humanities. Furthermore, the peer review gives more credibility to the project, which will thus be more trusted by other scholars and by the general public. Last but not less important, peer-reviewed projects are aggregated in the ARC node’s website of competence and their objects become searchable also there, obtaining greater visibility and more users.

  2. Reviews in Digital Humanities, edited by Jennifer Guiliano (IUPUI) and Roopika Risam (Salem State University)

    It is a forthcoming pilot of a peer-reviewed journal (the deadline for the first call of projects was September 2019) which aims to facilitate the evaluation of DH projects. The journal will bring together both the projects’ descriptions written by their directors and the reviews. Furthermore, all the peer-reviewed projects will be listed in a projects’ registry. With this journal the two editors want to help DH scholars get peer reviews of their projects, considering the importance of peer review for promotion and future funding. I find the idea of this journal extremely interesting both because DH projects of any field can be submitted and because the review process will be transparent, publishing the reviews.

    We look forward to reading it!

[1] R. Risam, ‘Rethinking Peer Review in the Age of Digital Humanities’, Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, no.4, 2014, doi:10.7264/N3WQ0220.

[2] S. Cavanagh, ‘Living in a Digital World: Rethinking Peer Review, Collaboration, and Open Access’, Journal of Digital Humanities, vol. 1, no. 4, Fall 2012, http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/1-4/living-in-a-digital-world-by-sheila-cavanagh/, (accessed 08/12/2019).

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Digital Humanities Is vs. Digital Humanities Are: more than a grammar issue

Writing the first contents of this website on Digital Humanities, I faced a problem: is “Digital Humanities” singular or plural? In Italian (my mother-tongue) Digital Humanities are plural and are always preceded by the definite article (Le Digital Humanities sono…): is it the same in English?

Thinking that this grammatical uncertainty was caused by not being a native English speaker, I decided to check the articles I had read about the definition of Digital Humanities and follow their habit. I discovered with surprise that some scholars use “Digital Humanities” as singular, some others as plural, and then I found two interesting articles about the topic, the first written by Kathleen Fitzpatrick,[1] the second, born as a blog-post,[2] subsequently revised and expanded in an article,[3] by Alan Liu.

Liu shows clearly how the linguistic problem hides a conceptual one, often avoided by the scholars who use the acronym DH: is/are Digital Humanities a field or fields? The existence of DH departments, conferences, journals, scholarships drives us to consider it as one organised field, and Liu notes that the actual trend is toward singular concord. However, the plural usage of the Humanities and of the Arts curbs this trend, coupled with the community of scholars who don’t make up their mind to adopt a standardised form.[4]

Reading between the lines I get the impression that for Liu the plural better embodies the values of Digital Humanities, i.e. pluralism, inclusiveness, openness, informality and collaboration with other fields.[5]

Fitzpatrick makes a stronger statement:

“Scholarly work across the humanities, as in all academic fields, is increasingly being done digitally. The particular contribution of the digital humanities, however, lies in its exploration of the difference that the digital can make to the kinds of work that we do as well as to the ways that we communicate with one another. These new modes of scholarship and communication will best flourish if they, like the digital humanities, are allowed to remain plural.” [6]

In conclusion, after this theoretical brief reflection, for now, I’ve decided to use Digital Humanities as a plural because it better reflects the idea of Digital Humanities which I am knowing. And I feel ready to give my first own definition of Digital Humanities:

Digital Humanities are collaborative digital answers to humanities questions.

[1] K. Fitzpatrick, “The Humanities, Done Digitally”, in M. K. Gold (ed.), Debates in the Digital Humanities,Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012, pp. 12-15. Available in digital edition of the book at http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/30.

[2] A. Liu, “Is Digital Humanities a Field? ‒ An Answer From the Point of View of Language” Alan Liu [web blog], 6 March 2013, https://liu.english.ucsb.edu/is-digital-humanities-a-field-an-answer-from-the-point-of-view-of-language/ (acceded 29 October 2019).

[3] A. Liu, “Is Digital Humanities a Field? An Answer from the Point of View of Language”, Journal of Siberian Federal University. Humanities & Social Sciences, n. 7, 2016, pp. 1546–52. https://doi.org/10.17516/1997-1370-2016-9-7-1546-1552.

[4] A. Liu, “Is Digital Humanities a Field?”, 2016, p. 1549.

[5] A. Liu, “Is Digital Humanities a Field?”, 2016, p. 1550.

[6] K. Fitzpatrick, “The Humanities, Done Digitally”.

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Digital Humanities: a lifeboat?

As often it has been said, the Humanities are living a crisis. It can be detected by the lower research funding, the increasingly frequent cuts to the budget of cultural institutions, the loss of social recognition that many careers in this field have had. Or more simply, thinking about how it is hard to get a job with a Humanities degree, compared to economists and engineers.

Could the young Digital Humanities come to the rescue of the tired and traditional Humanities? First of all, a question: what are Digital Humanities? Given a unique definition is not easy, if not impossible. Proof of that is the website What is Digital Humanities?, which contains more than 800 definitions, written by the participants from the Day of DH between 2009-2014. Here there is a visualisation of the most frequent words in these quotes, created thanks to Voyant Tools.

Not taking in consideration the words Humanities (1035 occurrences), Digital (953) and DH (224), the most used are Research (263), New (238), Tools (231), Technology (182), Technologies (155) and Use (143). Can we summarize the Digital Humanities as new research tools using the technology? It is not wrong, but something is missed.

At the 2011 DH Conference, hosted by the Stanford University Library, the discipline was described as a Big Tent but this metaphor was argued both by William Pannapacker[1] and Patrik Svensson[2]. For both, the core of the Digital Humanities is not the extraordinary proliferation of projects included in its boundaries, but the collaboration between multiple experts (computer scientists, engineers, librarians, archivists, historians…) who together build the Digital Humanities. And as a DH beginner, I am particularly fascinated by this collaborative attitude for creating something new and big that would be impossible to build individually.

As Pannapacker states:

“DH is a field that’s difficult to enter without significant support and collaboration. You can’t just read more books and articles—you have to learn to build things.[…]
The most important of those resources is human. We can’t succeed as islands. We have to collaborate with one another and with the larger research centers if the field is going to succeed outside of major universities. More and more, we recognize that the old model of the individual scholar—if it was ever really viable, and not a romantic myth—has become completely dysfunctional.”[3]

Furthermore, Svennson presents the Digital Humanities as a humanities project, which not only values the different experiences and backgrounds but also recognises the important role of junior scholars. They are often agents of change in the DH discussions and the author even quotes a PhD student among four examples of conceptualizations of the digital humanities as a project[4].

The openness of this definition of Digital Humanities encourages students (like me) to think about these topics, express their opinions and take part in the discussion (e.g. through Twitter). Notably, Svennson links the Digital Humanities as a humanities project to the future of all the Humanities. They are not two distinct disciplines because nowadays the Digital Humanities have an unquestionable role in the Humanities, or better, cross it.

Actually, this role is not so unquestionable, and I will give a first-hand example. Chatting with a young colleague, an art historian, a few days ago, he told me that the words ‘Digital’ and ‘Humanities’ were incompatible for him. Many Humanities scholars, more or less young, agree with him, splitting the Theory (the Humanities) from the subordinate Techne (the Digital). However, I am sure that many of them have taken advantage of a DH project at least one, for instance using Google Books or a digitalised archive.

I personally assent to Svennson’s idea of the Digital Humanities as a meeting place, where every discipline is powered maintaining its peculiarities, but I contemporary see the resistance and suspicion of the traditional Humanities. On the other hand, this talk of Elisa Barney, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Boise State University, shows how the engineers are excited to collaborate with the Humanities.

How digital technology helps solve mysteries in the humanities | Elisa Barney | TEDxBoise

To conclude, I would like to share a word of advice:

Dear Humanities scholars and students,
appreciate the practical, collaborative work of the Digital Humanities and its tools. Try to take a walk in the meeting place called ‘Digital Humanities’ and ask your unanswered question.
In the end, ask yourself: if the Digital Humanities can revitalise the Humanities, do we want to be rescued? If yes, the way is collaboration.

[1] W. Pannapacker, “‘Big Tent Digital Humanities,’ a View From the Edge, Part 2”, in Chronicle of Higher Education, 18 September 2011, viewed on 23/10/2019, https://www.chronicle.com/article/Big-Tent-Digital-Humanities-a/129036

[2] P. Svensson, “The digital humanities as a humanities project”. Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, vol. 11(1-2), 2012, pp. 42-60. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474022211427367

[3] W. Pannapacker, “‘Big Tent Digital Humanities,’ a View From the Edge, Part 1”, in Chronicle of Higher Education, 31 July 2011, viewed on 23/10/2019, https://www.chronicle.com/article/Big-Tent-Digital-Humanities/128434

[4] P. Svensson, Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, p. 46.

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