0.31 European elephants in the room (are they the ones with the  (Page 4/9)

If the opportunities are so clear, then why are the responses so unsatisfactory, as with the case of ERIH?  It is easy to point the finger at the faults in the tried and true system of peer review as the source of difficulties.  Yes, it is a system that is difficult to manage and expensive to maintain, but the glory of Garfield’s citation analysis is that it manages to capture peer review happening, as it were, in the wild, at that point when another scholar references a piece of work as influential for his own, thereby making explicit a judgment call about the importance of another scholar’s work.  Surely the digital humanities community can find a similar juncture, more subtle than hit counts but more easily captured than full-blown reviews, because the community of scholars should be able to agree upon what constitutes a quality output, whatever its format.

Unfortunately, it appears that we cannot do this even in the analog realm. A recent workshop held in conjunction with the 2010 Modern Language Association Conference in assessing digital humanities scholarship created in non-traditional formats (thematic research collections, e-lit, e-scholarly editions, etc) suggested the opposite. Over thirty academics, from Department Chairs to graduate students, attended. The workshop was developed around a series of case studies. The first case study was an e-edition of the work of a little-known poet. While the edition was replete with contextual information, scholarly apparatus, and technical background, the first comment by a workshop participant was that this was not scholarship, it was service. The creation of a scholarly edition was a service activity, not a scholarly one regardless of the medium of presentation. The workshop facilitators immediately realized that the battle lines were far from fixed and that having a work in digital form only served to reinforce certain existing prejudices rather than allow for a widened scholarly horizon.

Given such challenges, is it possible we could focus, writ large, on developing new modes of peer review for digital production, as occurs within the NINES community? If so, can we convince institutions and funding agencies to accept the results of these modes?  The answers to both of these questions surely must be yes, but the ever-broadening focus of European digital humanities scholars has not yet come to rest on these most political and procedural issues within the ecosystem of scholarly communications and production.  The problem may be deeper entrenched than we expect, but doesn't that also mean that the opportunities for real innovation are greater?

Many of the reasons for the disagreements among us are cultural, but others may have to do with the nature of the resources themselves, in particular when we shift our focus back purely to the digital realm. For it is here that we find ourselves yet again handling that old chestnut crossed with a hot potato, sustainability.  If we do not yet “trust” digital resources the way we do analog ones, at least part of the reason for this is that we have not had them around for hundreds of years, and do not yet feel secure that we will have them around for many years or decades more. How can we validate a scholarly career on the basis of something that may be perceived as ephemeral?