What is “”Digital Scholarship””? How can it be sustainable?

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proposed by Stewart Varner and Erin White

Some questions we have about using the internet to support research:

  • What rumors have you heard?
    • Never do it. You won’t get tenure.
    • You need to learn it ’cause we need to justify our existence as a library.
    • There’s no point because in 10 years it won’t work.
    • It’s just a fad.
    • All the datasets are available already! Everything is out there and complete already.
    • It’s in the public domain so it’s free. Right?
    • Why do we need a library? We can all just have kindles.
    • Digital is scary. We don’t want to be co-opted.
    • If students don’t write papers, that’s not scholarship.
    • Students are digital natives (false).
  • What the hell is digital scholarship, anyway?
    • Opportunities of digitization and the web allow for research of rare texts
    • What isn’t it? (In libraries especially)
    • Publishing: Digital collections, text mining, scholarly publications
    • Teaching: Pedagogy, teaching
    • Making the argument vs. doing the research
    • The space between…
    • Compare it to ink/analog scholarship? Or see it as a hybrid, complement to “real-life”/work with physical objects
    • What’s the big deal?
    • Associations are creating guidlines for evaluating digital work (MLA, AHA)
    • Should not reduce the conversation to digital vs. analog. Does not have to be one or the other all the time.
    • Using the humanities to critique technological questions
      • Systems are not neutral (i.e. binary gender choices on web forms)
      • Critique of “how it’s been done” – historical defaults are hard to change
      • Even maps are opinionated/not neutral
  • Ideas for the future
    • Directory of digital scholarship – a catalog of projects
  • How do we use technology to support, disseminate, and transform research?
    • It’s expected. “Digital natives” – maybe not so tech savvy, but have expectations of technology and online availability
    • Partnerships – what relationships should we build?
  • Should we rely only on grants to pursue Big Digital Projects? Or is small okay too?
  • What are some examples of digital scholarship that have had staying power?
    • Should it matter?
    • Can scholarly work can be ephemeral? What happens when things break? Citation is important. How can you establish provenance?
    • We need to think about sustained effort for some of these things; it’s not just published and put on a shelf.
    • Creates a crisis in trust.
    • Digital Preservation is a serious problem and expensive to solve.
  • Should we have a suite of reusable tools rather than bespoke, one-off web projects?
    • Should digital preservation be part of the creation process.
    • Reusable tools are useful
    • Identify and support stable formats and open access.
  • Readings
    • Moretti – Graphs, maps and trees
    • Gold, ed. – Debates in Digital Humanities