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2008D21Vie

Evaluating Digital Scholarship: A “More Capacious Conception”
Reviewed by Stephanie Vie
Vie_S@fortlewis.edu

James P. Purdy and Joyce Walker: Valuing Digital Scholarship: Exploring the Changing Realities of Intellectual Work, Part I

Purdy and Walker started by noting that scholars often attempt to establish digital works as those equivalent to print, but, by doing so, they often privilege print, a binary that leads to difficulties. Some of these difficulties include the following: 1) This binary privileges one term as superior to the other; 2) a perception is established that “good scholars choose print”; 3) digital scholarship is looked at as suspect while print is considered “trustworthy”; 4) digital authors must then seek to make their work “as good as” print; and 5) this binary only looks at materiality. Thus, we should ask what kinds of scholarly activities do we wish to promote? We should also think about value. What kind of knowledge does our work value? Who uses it? What skills are used to produce it? Who has evaluated it and assessed the ideas contained within?

Cheryl E. Ball: Scholarly Peer-review in New Media

With an introduction that relied on a student's video, “Words are the Ultimate Abstraction” (by Robert Watkins), Ball had the audience laughing at many of the humorous moments included in this piece. And indeed, Ball's presentation centered on the reactions of academics to this video. Some found it too academic in tone and language, asking “what's not scholarly about this piece?” Others “did not know what work went into the movie,” thus finding it lacking value as a scholarly argument (but believing it “okay as a pedagogical example.”) Watkins' movie exemplifies our difficulties assessing the value of new media work in academia today. As an example, Ball described how a recent three-minute video took nearly eighteen hours of work to produce, work that might not be seen as valuable by those who fail to recognize the process that goes into the creation of such work. Ball closed by noting that we can use concepts of style, commodity, and materiality as ways to assess the value of digital texts.

Gail E. Hawisher: New Scholarship for a New World: A Balancing Act, Part I

Hawisher began by articulating her desire to seek common ground for scholars as we weather the changes that accompany the incorporation of digital media into our field, changes that are so dramatic that the maps we use currently provide little guidance any more. Some of the trends we are currently seeing are 1) the potential threat that digital publishing efforts pose to print-based university presses, who must adapt (and quickly) and 2) the disconnect between our dependence on digital materials and our lack of experience at evaluating them (such as digital refereed electronic articles and monographs produced only in electronic format). A common way of viewing digital media, then, is as a threat, an “end of a reign.” Instead, says Hawisher, we should focus on our common values to develop promotion and tenure guidelines that work fairly for all scholars in a department. These shared values include 1) belief in the value of peer review (but broadened to incorporate a variety of forms), 2) the retention of value on scholarly work that has productive/visible impact on our field (but broadened to include things like usage figures or statistics for online work or awards), 3) our belief in the value of high scholarly standards of excellence (broadened to admit other forms; i.e., sites such as The Voice of the Shuttle (http://vos.ucsb.edu/) and other online repositories of information), and 4) the retention of our value on parity and equity by taking out language that paints digital media as atypical and print as typical in promotion and tenure materials.

Cynthia L. Selfe: New Scholarship for a New World: A Balancing Act, Part II

Selfe (and Patrick Berry, associate editor of Computers and Composition) presented on a new model for digital scholarship, the Computers and Composition Digital Press (https://ccdigitalpress.org/). The press will publish e-books and other multimodal productions. Selfe showed two of the promotional videos for the press (available on their website) and described how they hoped to form “an intentional network” that is “much more distributed than a community of practice,” something more along the lines of “it's not what you know but who you know.” Their mission, editorial board, and call for projects are all available on their website.