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