Digital Humanities Projects in Music

The following guidelines are designed to help departments and faculty members implement effective evaluation procedures for hiring, reappointment, tenure, and promotion. They apply to scholars working with digital media as their subject matter and to those who use digital methods or whose work takes digital form.

Digital innovation receives widely varying levels of formal recognition when scholars are hired or evaluated for tenure or promotion. That disconnect between emerging practice and the evaluation of that practice discourages scholars at all levels from engaging with the new capacities. It also prevents the profession, and the departments in which it is grounded, from creatively confronting ways in which historical knowledge increasingly will be created and communicated. The American Historical Association has established this committee to help ensure that our profession acts in far-sighted ways as the digital presence grows. Most concretely, it seeks to help clarify the policies associated with the evaluation of scholarly work in digital forms.

While book reviews have been a significant and influential form of scholarly communication since the earliest scholarly journals, this form of post-publication peer review remains limited to print books for the most part. Despite the increase in electronic publications—e-books and more experimental forms—book reviews continue to represent paper publications almost exclusively. There has been attention to incorporating pre-publication peer review into the process of publishing digital scholarship, but the post-publication review has received far less consideration. Given its long–standing importance, the absence of the equivalent of the book review for the world of electronic scholarship may impact its academic acceptance, especially for promotion and tenure.

The paper provides the results of the first phase of the research project Trust and Authority in Scholarly Communications in the Light of the Digital Transition. It provides for an examination of the behaviours and attitudes of academic researchers as producers and consumers of scholarly information resources in the digital era in respect to how they determine authority and trustworthiness in the sources they use, cite, and publish in. The first phase of the study utilized focus groups to formulate research questions for the project as a whole. It provided the direction for the literature review, interviews, and questionnaires studies that would follow. Fourteen focus groups were held in the UK and US in order to obtain this information. A total of 66 science and social science researchers participated. The main findings were: (a) researchers play down difficulties of establishing trustworthiness, not because there are none, but because they have well-developed methods of establishing trust; (b) citation-derived metrics are becoming more important in regard to where researchers publish; (c) social media are ancillary to research, but are used for promotion of research and idea generation; (d) researchers are suspicious and confused about open access, but less so if produced by a traditional publisher; (e) there was a uniformity of perceptions/behaviour of researchers irrespective of differences in subject, country, and age; (f) although some early career researchers behave the same as their more senior colleagues this is because of a fear of the system: they actually think differently.

Structural changes to the scholarly environment are taking place as a result of the introduction of Web 2.0 technologies, which have given rise to Open Science 2.0 initiatives, such as open access publishing, open data, citizen science, and open peer evaluation systems. In turn, this is leading to new ways of building, showcasing, and measuring scholarly reputation through emerging platforms, such as ResearchGate. The article reports the findings of a survey of the opinions and practices of 251 European scholars about this emerging scholarly market. Findings showed that traditional research-related activities, including conducting and collaborating in research, taking part in multidisciplinary projects, and publishing in journals contribute most to scholarly reputation. The greatest weaknesses of reputational platforms were a lack of trustworthiness and being open to gaming. The large majority of researchers, despite some reservations, thought that reputational systems were here to stay and will become increasingly important in the future, and especially for younger researchers.

Reviews in Digital Humanities, edited by Dr. Jennifer Guiliano and Dr. Roopika Risam, is the pilot of a peer-reviewed journal and project registry that facilitates scholarly evaluation and dissemination of digital humanities work and its outputs. We accept submissions of projects that blend humanistic and technical inquiry in a broad range of methods, disciplines, scopes, and scales. These include but are not limited to: digital archives, multimedia or multimodal scholarship, digital exhibits, visualizations, digital games, and digital tools. We particularly encourage submission of digital scholarship in critical ethnic, African diaspora, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian American, and postcolonial studies. Submit your work or contact the editors at reviewsindigitalhumanities@gmail.com.

The Journal of Digital Humanities is a comprehensive, peer-reviewed, open access journal that features the best scholarship, tools, and conversations produced by the digital humanities community in the previous quarter.

The Institute of Historical Research (IHR) has been collecting longitudinal data on attitudes to and use of digital resources since 2003. Although the data shows gradual changes in attitude towards the use of digital resources, with increasingly positive attitudes, citation practice has not kept pace even with this slow change in research culture. This paper will uses citation practice as a focus for discussion about a cultural problem that still remains in the digital humanities: lack of esteem for digital resources.
Some of the arguments for citing print over digital sources in journals and monographs are reviewed and analysed, and changes to citation practice and resource naming, which can address the stronger arguments again digital citation, will be proposed.