Tag: Project

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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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Top 3 DH Podcasts

Walters Art Museum, Book of Hours, Marginalia, Walters Manuscript W.428, Folio 88r

Podcasts are a useful way to learn new things while walking, driving, tidying up or simply when you are doing mechanical and repetitive operations on your laptop.

Here a list of the top 3 podcasts about Digital Humanities, with links to the speakers and to the projects mentioned.

1. BBC Radio 3 Arts & Ideas – Episode title: The Digital Humanities

Date: 21 December 2018
Duration: 58 minutes

Interviewees:
Kathryn Sutherland, St Anne’s College, Oxford
Noah Millstone, University of Birmingham
Andrew Prescott, University of Glasgow (@Ajprescott on Twitter)

The speakers give a snapshot of Digital Humanities, starting from their DH projects. Kathryn Sutherland speaks about Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts Digital Edition, which unified digitally Austen’s manuscripts held by different libraries and private collections disseminated around the world. Transcribing and XML encoding 1100 pages took three years of work: a big commitment, which led to the first project to encode draft manuscripts in different directions! Sutherland explains how the digital can perform a text, but she warns that the Literature can’t be reduced just to data.

Noah Millstone of the University of Birmingham presents the project Manuscript Pamphleteering in Early Stuart England about the large pamphlet literature developed in England before the outbreak of the Civil War (1642). In this project, collaboration was essential because the enormous labour of transcribing these manuscripts, often full of marginalia with readers’ reactions, was only overcome with the help of volunteers, who made transcriptions, which were then proofread. Moreover, Millstone considers DH projects as a possible starting point for others, saying “We need to be aware and to teach students and new scholars to be aware that there are always going to be new ways of answering the questions”.

Finally, Andrew Prescott, starting from the avant-garde 90s project Electronic Beowulf (the version 4.1 is now also available online), explains how all manuscripts can be considered like palimpsests because they have different layers of information: Digital Humanities help to explore this complexity, always with the awareness that data can be reused in different and new ways. Furthermore, Prescott underlines the role of the digital for exploring special collections and speaks about how the libraries are reinventing themselves in the digital era.

2. University of Oxford, Centre for the Study of the Book – Episode title: Bibliography in Bits

Date: 23 February 2014
Duration: 20 minutes

Interviewee:
Will Noel, Penn Libraries, University of Pennsylvania (@WillNoel on Twitter; his website: http://www.willnoel.com/)

Will Noel starts the podcast talking about a project directed by him: the Archimedes Palimpsest Project. It is a fascinating project which aims to uncover Archimedes text beneath a medieval prayerbook, which is then defined as a palimpsest. Noel doesn’t speak only about the potentials of digital technology for the study of medieval manuscripts; he also stresses the necessity of creating simple and sustainable datasets under Creative Commons license: only that guarantees that in the future data can be managed in different ways for discovering something new. The Archimedes Palimpsest dataset, first issued in 2006, could appear too plain and non-interactive but it is incredible to think that data are still available and usable after 13 years! Also the Illustrated Manuscript Project for the digitalisation of the invaluable collection of illuminated manuscripts of the Walters Art Museum, in Baltimore, Maryland, is under Creative Commons license: the data stored in the machine readable and human readable archive are free to use, as the images made available on Flickr. As Noel states “All sorts of interesting things can arise from that as long as your data is known and as long as it is free and as long as people can do what they want with it”.

3. Indoor Voices Podcast – Episode title: Dissecting the digital humanities with Matthew Gold

Date: 21 October 2019
Duration: 33 minutes

Interviewee:
Matthew K. Gold, City University of New York (@mkgold on Twitter)

Matthew Gold, associate professor of English and Digital Humanities, presents his idea of Digital Humanities as a natural evolution of the academic discipline of the Humanities. He speaks extensively about the M.A. program in Digital Humanities, whose he is the director, at the CUNY Graduate Center and explains the approach of the course, which leads each student to reply to a question through the creation of a digital artefact (I judge this approach really similar to the one proposed at the University College Cork). As an example, he mentions the project Quantifying Kissinger of Micki Kaufmann, who faced the challenge of exploring a corpus too big to be read. At the end of the podcast, Gold answers two difficult questions:

  • How to answer the critics who dismiss DH as quantitate and not intellectual?
  • Is the term Digital Humanities plural or singular?

Listen to the podcast to find the answers out.

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