Digital Humanities Lab @ GGC

Historical scholarship is, of course, already digital in many ways. Historians conduct research in digital libraries, use digital tools in their teaching, and participate in conversations on digital networks. Many colleges and universities have created centers and laboratories to foster digital innovation across the disciplines. New forms of scholarship and teaching are now taking shape and contributing to our understanding of the past. These forms of scholarship, in the judgement of the AHA, are no less deserving of professional evaluation than print scholarship.

Following the lead of scholarly societies in some of the disciplines most actively represented in digital humanities work, the Association for Computers and the Humanities is putting forth some draft guidelines for the evaluation of digital scholarship in tenure and promotion processes. We are grateful to the Modern Language Association, the American Historical Association, Emory University, University of Southern California, Texas A&M, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the NINES Institute on Evaluating Digital Scholarship, and our many colleagues for doing the work on which we base our guidelines.

The College Art Association (CAA) and the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH), with
funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, convened a Task Force to Develop Guidelines
for the Evaluation of Promotion and Tenure in Digital Art and Architectural History. The intent
of the task force is to ensure that as our colleagues employ new technologies, they also
contribute to best practices criteria for digital scholarship. These guidelines will help our
members and those who assess their work to identify core contributions to the advancement of
domain knowledge using digital resources, computational analysis, and/or multimedia modes of
presentation and publication to create scholarship.

An issue of the Journal of Digital Humanities centered on the evaluation of digital humanities work.
Living in a Digital World: Rethinking Peer Review, Collaboration, and Open Access by Sheila Cavanagh
Evaluating Collaborative Digital Scholarship (or, Where Credit is Due) by Bethany Nowviskie
A Call to Redefine Historical Scholarship in the Digital Turn by Alex Galarza, Jason Heppler, and Doug Seefeldt

These 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.