Digital Humanities Scholarly Communication
Study of the current state of digital humanities is in many ways analogous to a study of recent developments in scholarly communications. “[M]ore akin to a common methodological outlook than an investment in any one specific set of texts or even technologies,” today’s digital humanities field is largely defined based on principles of open access, authorial collaboration, and a digital dissemination component, versus through a shared topic focus (Kirschenbaum, 2010).
Digital humanities as it existed in the 1940s was a field bound by the use of digital data analysis techniques such as text mining, GIS, and 3d modelling (Coble, Potvin, & Shirazi, 2014). The digital element was in the process of gathering data, rather than an emphasis on particularly digital dissemination of the research. Per Burdick et al. (2016), “the advent of the Web in the early 1990s accelerated the transition in digital scholarship from processing to networking.” In the mid-2000s (Coble et al., 2014) the digital emphasis in digital humanities shifted to include publication form. Such a shift increased the importance of the publications’ multimodality, level of graphics and design, as well as a “reinterpretation of the humanities as a generative enterprise” in which documenting the creation of the publication became as central an activity as the dispersal of the research (Burdick et al., 2016). Perhaps a relevant conversation here is the distinction between publication, project product, and scholarly communication—this line in digital humanities is quite blurry.
Today, digital humanities exists to a large extent commentary on and contrast to traditional scholarly communications (Coble et al., 2014). Traditional scholarly communications have emphasized the monograph and journal (and more recently their digitized versions)—static, peer reviewed, pay walled, academic audience focused, author-owned publications, generally topically centered on the product of research rather than the process of conducting the research (Burpee et al., 2015). Recent digital humanities scholarly communications, alternatively, have appeared as open access articles and books, websites, programs, online exhibits, hypertexts, games, and more (Burdick et al., 2016). These publications are often interdisciplinary, intentionally inventive in form, accessible to a non-academic public in both pay wall and readability, and open (sometimes collaboratively so) about the process used for developing the publication.
A current conversation within digital humanities is indeed what is within the scope of a publication. Burpee et al. (2015) note that “there are underlying questions about whether the data should be shared in its raw form, at its various analytical stages, or post analysis; whether summaries, specific sub-sets, or all of the data is included; and by extension, whether methods, tools, and systems developed for interpretation and analysis are part of the published object.”
It’s important to note that digital humanities scholars have struggled to map their field’s publication forms onto more traditional scholarly communication formats as relate to tenure processes and library preservation practices (Burpee et al., 2015; Urberg, 2020). Much recent innovation in digital humanities scholarly communication has been toward bridging this divide. Organizations like Anvil Academic peer review open source publications, and tools like Scalar offer platforms for digital scholarship with improved digital preservation capabilities (Coble et al., 2014).
References
Burdick, A., Drucker, J., Lunenfeld, P., Presner, T., & Schnapp, J. (2016). Digital_Humanities.
The MIT Press.
Burpee, J. K., Glushko, B., Goddard, L., Kehoe, I., & Moore, P. (2015). Outside the Four
Corners: Exploring Non-Traditional Scholarly Communication. Scholarly & Research
Communication, 1–17.
Coble, Z., Potvin, S., & Shirazi, R. (2014). Process as product: scholarly communication
experiments in the digital humanities. Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication, 2(3).
https://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.1137
Kirschenbaum, M. G. (2010). What is digital humanities and what’s it doing in english
departments? ADE Bulletin, 55–61. https://doi.org/10.1632/ade.150.55
Urberg, M. (2020). Digital humanities projects and standards: Let’s get this conversation started!
Information Services & Use, 40(3), 13–224.
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