This could be either a “talking” or “making” session depending on what we want out of it, but I thought THATCamp might be a good place to have an extended conversation about processes of promotion, tenure, and peer review in the digital age. As a current PhD student who thinks of traditional modes of scholarly production (books, articles, etc.) as somewhat limiting conceptually and, in certain respects, intellectually and is eager to cultivate a cv/resume that features a range of digital projects and collaborative experiences that, in all likelihood, deviate from what my department—history—thinks of as “creditable” scholarship, I feel like now is the perfect time to strategize ways to push our respective departments in more open-minded directions when it comes to evaluating and appreciating the methods and results of the digital work we are producing.

This issue is perhaps best described by Alex Galarza, Jason Heppler and Douglas Seefeldt in their call to redefine historical scholarship at the 2012 AHA:

“Digital tools are transforming the practice of history, yet junior scholars and graduate students are facing obstacles and risks to their professional advancement in using methods unrecognized as rigorous scholarly work. Their peers and evaluators are often unable or unwilling to address the scholarship on its merits…The disconnect between traditional evaluation and training and new digital methods means young scholars take on greater risks when dividing their limited time and attention on new methods that ultimately may not ever face scholarly evaluation on par with traditional scholarly production.”

Not to be assigning homework for a fun, informal event like THATCamp, but The Journal of the Digital Humanities recently did a good job of explaining what is at stake regarding the assessment and review of digital scholarship, while also providing some solutions and potential guidelines for academic departments and scholars to follow.

Therefore, I propose we talk about promotion, tenure, and peer review as it relates to the various digital projects we and others are pouring our time and mental energies into. If we are feeling up for the challenge, we could even draft a white paper to present to our respective departments that illustrates the merits of digital scholarship and how it might be properly assessed in line with existing disciplinary standards. Sure nothing may come of it, but at least we’ll have made our voices heard.

At UWM we’ve been digitizing our archival and special collections materials since 2001 – right now we have nearly 120,000 objects available online and that number is growing. Like us, many libraries and archives are working toward greater access to archival collections via digitization. We do this to provide broader and open access to the public so people can make new uses of these materials, to increase access for research and teaching, and potentially to ease the burden on fragile physical items.

At THATCamp, I’m interested in inviting a lively discussion about how researchers, instructors, artists, students, etc… actually use these digitized archival collections, especially now that we’ve entered an age of big data, access to massive corpora, and expectations of open and online access.

At UWM we have begun to experiment with making entire archival collections available online. But through design or through necessity, given limited resources and space, most of what we have made available to date are selections from collections, rather than the whole thing (stay tuned, though …). But what changes when we go big? Making complete collections available online raises a number of provocative questions about how archives might be used and how archival research is conducted.

We have seen examples of how access to massive corpora of digitized texts can enable researchers to ask questions they couldn’t have asked before. What does access to more and more (but still only a fraction of) digitized archival collections enable? What are the benefits?; what new questions can be engaged (and by whom) with access to tools like full text searching, metadata structures that reinforce relationships between objects, and simply being able to access disparate collections in a homogeneous environment; can new relationships and contexts become apparent? What are the costs when you consult a digital rather than a physical artifact; what is crucial about consulting the physical object and what isn’t; are relationships between materials and the context of the collection still apparent in an online environment; does research that relies entirely on digital surrogates count in places like academia; does its “aura” matter?

Ultimately, the point in talking through these questions would be to come up with some best practices/protocols, etc. for how can we make research in the digitized archives richer and more productive.