Jennifer Edmond
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DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY AND THE PRACTICES OF HUMANITIES RESEARCH Digital Technology and the Practices of Humanities Research Edited by Jennifer Edmond https://www.openbookpublishers.com © 2020 Jennifer Edmond. Copyright of individual chapters is maintained by the chapters’ authors. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made to the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information: Jennifer Edmond (ed.), Digital Technology and the Practices of Humanities Research. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2020, https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0192 In order to access detailed and updated information on the license, please visit https://doi. org/10.11647/OBP.0192#copyright Further details about CC BY licenses are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/ All external links were active at the time of publication unless otherwise stated and have been archived via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine at https://archive.org/web Any digital material and resources associated with this volume are available at https://doi. org/10.11647/OBP.0192#resources Every effort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders and any omission or error will be corrected if notification is made to the publisher. ISBN Paperback: 978-1-78374-839-6 ISBN Hardback: 978-1-78374-840-2 ISBN Digital (PDF): 978-1-78374-841-9 ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 978-1-78374-842-6 ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 978-1-78374-843-3 ISBN Digital (XML): 978-1-78374-844-0 DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0192 Cover image: photo by Nanda Green on Unsplash https://unsplash.com/photos/BeVW HMXYwwo Cover design: Anna Gatti Contents Acknowledgements ix Notes on the Contributors xi 1. Introduction: Power, Practices, and the Gatekeepers of 1 Humanistic Research in the Digital Age Jennifer Edmond The Impact of Collaboration 13 Evaluators as Gatekeepers 14 Publishers as Gatekeepers 16 This Volume’s Contribution 18 Bibliography 19 2. Publishing in the Digital Humanities: The Treacle of the 21 Academic Tradition Adriaan van der Weel and Fleur Praal The Functions of Scholarly Publishing in the Print Paradigm 25 Transferring the Functions of Publishing to the Digital 29 Medium Dissemination 31 Registration 34 Certification 38 Archiving 40 Conclusions 41 Bibliography 44 3. Academic Publishing: New Opportunities for the Culture 49 of Supply and the Nature of Demand Jennifer Edmond and Laurent Romary Introduction 49 The Place of the Book in Humanities Communication 52 Scholarly Reading and Browsing 55 vi Digital Technology and the Practices of Humanities Research Old and New Ways to Share Knowledge 58 The Evaluator as an Audience for Scholarship 62 Barriers to Change, and Opportunities 63 Research Data and the Evolving Communications 71 Landscape Conclusions 72 Bibliography 75 4. The Impact of Digital Resources 81 Claire Warwick and Claire Bailey-Ross Understanding and Measuring Impact 82 Commercial Impact 91 Media and Performance 92 Cultural Heritage 93 Policy Impact 96 Limitations of the REF Case Studies 96 Conclusions 98 Bibliography 99 5. Violins in the Subway: Scarcity Correlations, Evaluative 105 Cultures, and Disciplinary Authority in the Digital Humanities Martin Paul Eve Judging Excellence and Academic Hiring and Tenure 107 The Diverse Media Ecology of Digital Humanities 112 Strategies for Changing Cultures: Disciplinary Segregation, 115 Print Simulation, and Direct Economics Bibliography 119 6. ‘Black Boxes’ and True Colour — A Rhetoric of Scholarly 123 Code Joris J. van Zundert, Smiljana Antonijević, and Tara L. Andrews Introduction 123 Background 125 Methodology 131 Experiences 134 Inventio — The Impetus for DH Researchers to Code 134 Dispositio — How Coding Constructs Argument 137 Elocutio — Coding Style, Aesthetics of Code 141 Memoria — The Interaction between Code and Theory 143 Actio — The Presentation and Reception of DH Codework 146 Contents vii Conclusions 150 Recommendations 152 Appendix 6.A: Survey Questions 157 Bibliography 158 7. The Evaluation and Peer Review of Digital Scholarship in 163 the Humanities: Experiences, Discussions, and Histories Julianne Nyhan Introduction 163 Experiences and Discussion of Evaluation c. 1963–2001 167 Individual and Group Experiences of Making Digital 168 Scholarship What Should Be Evaluated? 170 Which Evaluative Criteria? 172 Organising the Peer Review Process 173 Implicit Peer Review 174 Conclusion 177 Bibliography 179 8. Critical Mass: The Listserv and the Early Online 183 Community as a Case Study in the Unanticipated Consequences of Innovation in Scholarly Communication Daniel Paul O’Donnell The Listserv as Case Study 185 You’ve got Mail 186 The LISTSERV Revolution 188 The Invisible Seminar 189 The Invisible Water-Cooler 191 What Is It that an Academic Mailing List Disrupts? 195 Online Communities vs Learned Societies 198 Same as it Ever Was? Looking Backwards and Forwards 200 Conclusion 202 Bibliography 203 9. Springing the Floor for a Different Kind of Dance: 207 Building DARIAH as a Twenty-First-Century Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities Jennifer Edmond, Frank Fischer, Laurent Romary, and Toma Tasovac Introduction: What’s in a Word? 207 But What Is Research Infrastructure? 210 viii Digital Technology and the Practices of Humanities Research Infrastructures as Knowledge Spaces 212 Why Do the Arts and Humanities Need Research 214 Infrastructure? History of a New Model of RI Development 216 The Activities of the DARIAH ERIC 221 The DARIAH Marketplace 222 DARIAH Working Groups 225 Policy and Foresight 225 Training, Education, Skills, and Careers 226 Conclusions (and a Few Concerns) 227 Appendix 9.A: Definitions of Research Infrastructure 230 Bibliography 232 10. The Risk of Losing the Thick Description: Data 235 Management Challenges Faced by the Arts and Humanities in the Evolving FAIR Data Ecosystem Erzsébet Tóth-Czifra Realising the Promises of FAIR within Discipline-Specific 235 Scholarly Practices A Cultural Knowledge Iceberg, Submerged in an Analogue 237 World Legal Problems that Are Not Solely Legal Problems 239 The Risk of Losing the Thick Description upon the 242 Remediation of Cultural Heritage The Scholarly Data Continuum 247 Data in Arts and Humanities — Still a Dirty Word? 250 The Critical Mass Challenge and the Social Life of Data 251 The Risk of Losing the Thick Description — Again 255 Conclusions: On our Way towards a Truly FAIR Ecosystem 258 for the Arts and Humanities Bibliography 263 Index 267 Acknowledgements First and foremost, the editor of this volume would like to thank the European Science Foundation for making possible both the original working group along with its meetings, and this open access publication. The NeDiMAH network continues to be a point of reference for scholars who are exploring not just how to use digital methods in the humanities and what it means to do this, but also what is at stake in the digital turn for our diverse and yet interconnected disciplines. It would be remiss not to also thank the participants in the NeDiMAH events: their contributions to that early discussion are woven into the fabric of this volume and the issues it pursues. In particular, I would like to thank the Zadar meeting group: Linda Bree, Emma Clarke, Marin Dacos, Bianca Gualandi, Angela Holzer, Christina Kamposiori, Eva Kekou, Camilla Leathem, Francesca Morselli, Claudine Moulin, Alex O’Connor, Franjo Pehar, and Susan Reilly. Their collective and enthusiastic commitment to capturing a multidisciplinary and multisectoral snapshot of the shifts occurring in the communications landscape of the arts and humanities remain astonishingly relevant even after so many years. Finally, I am grateful to the many authors of this work who have either been required to show great patience with the slow development of the volume or work to very tight deadlines in order to bring its slow-growing content up to date. I include in this group those authors who were, for a number of reasons, unable to stay with the volume until the end, but whose drafts contributed to my own understanding of the institutional and individual issues in play. In particular, I would like to warmly thank Susan Schreibman for her early contributions in clarifying the focus of this volume and assembling an exciting panel of contributors and Laurence Taylor for his careful copyediting. Notes on the Contributors Tara L. Andrews is a university professor in Digital Humanities at the University of Vienna. She obtained her DPhil in Oriental Studies at the University of Oxford in 2009; she also holds a MPhil in Byzantine Studies from Oxford, and a BSc in Humanities and Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She currently leads an SNSF-funded project to produce a digital critical edition of the twelfth- century Armenian-language chronicle by Mattēos U hayeci (Matthew of Edessa). More broadly, Andrews’s research interests include ṙ ҅ Byzantine history of the middle period (in particular the tenth to twelfth centuries), Armenian history and historiography from the fifth to the twelfth centuries, and the application of computational analysis and digital methods to the fields of medieval history and philology. From 2010 to 2013, Andrews worked at the KU Leuven University with Prof. Caroline Macé on the ‘Tree of Texts’ project, which