A new survey of 4,000 historians found that most are willing to try digital scholarship—such as interactive maps or online databases—but that the number of journals interested in publishing such online scholarship is tiny.
Enter the Sustaining Digital History project, which is trying to make it easier for history scholars to publish digitally in well-established forums. The group held a daylong meeting last week at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, where about 30 attendees tried to figure out how to translate this burgeoning interest in digital publishing into a new breed of scholarly work. Among the attendees were editors from eight historical journals (including the editor of the discipline’s flagship journal, The American Historical Review)—and by the end of the afternoon, each had committed to experimenting with digital scholarship.
The group also made plans to create a database of authors interested in writing this content and an advisory board that helps editors create digital content using the latest Web technologies.
Digital work has struggled to find respect and exposure in an academic world where clout comes from a system of peer review and print journals. Although some journals, including The American Historical Review, have sporadically featured digital work, only a few have made digitally born scholarship a mainstay of their publications.
Much of the digital work that scholars do now is outside of the traditional academic-publishing realm—published in blogs or on Wikipedia. About 20 percent of scholars in the survey said they had published some kind of work in a native digital form. The survey was conducted by Robert Townsend, assistant director of research and publications at the American Historical Association.
Doug Seefeldt, a historian who is one of the project’s directors, believes that digital scholarship delves into history in ways that works on paper cannot. “The complexities of the past, it seems to me, are a perfect match for the capabilities of some of these digital tools,” he said in an interview. He pointed to work like the University of Virginia’s Texas Slavery Project and Stanford University’s Spatial History Project, where interactive maps, searchable primary sources, video, and audio are as important as text.
The Sustaining Digital History project directors have established an apparatus to help editors publish digital scholarship. They are making a database of authors interested in producing digitally born work. They are also putting together a team of experts that will help editors with the nuts and bolts of this new sort of scholarship. “It’s not too long before we drop the digital, and it’ll just become history,” Mr. Seefeldt said.
5 Responses to Historians Are Interested in Digital Scholarship but Lack Outlets
ak169808 - October 5, 2010 at 11:05 pm
Wow this article has gotten me enthused about digital scholarships.
history_grrrl - October 6, 2010 at 1:52 am
Is it just me, or do others find it difficult to understand what the author of this piece means by “digital scholarship”? In the first paragraph, she includes the examples of interactive maps and online databases. Aren’t those just resources available electronically for scholars to use in their, um, scholarship? She refers separately to “digital publishing” or “digital content”; does this just mean “publishing one’s scholarship online”? But then she refers to “digital work” as meaning things like blogging and Wikipedia; that doesn’t sound like scholarship to me. One of the interviewees talks about “digital tools,” which in context seems to refer to primary sources available online. Finally, the phrase “digitally born work” appears a few times; what the heck is that?The author seems to (consistently, at least) conflate terms referring to primary sources (the raw material — which may appear on paper or online — that historians use to produce scholarship) and terms referring to secondary literature (the scholarship itself, which may appear on paper or online). As a result, I have no idea what is being discussed or proposed by these historians. Too bad; I wouldn’t mind knowing what they’re up to.
r_welzenbach - October 6, 2010 at 9:53 am
@history_grrrl–you’re right that it can be really difficult to define what is meant by “digital scholarship.” But in this case, I think Rachel Ensign is not referring to *using* interactive maps and online databases, but rather to *creating* them, and making them available to others (publishing!).These aren’t just “resources available electronically for scholars to use” by magic–someone has to gather, interpret, and present the data that populates them, and the trouble is that traditionally, that work hasn’t “counted” as scholarship in and of itself in the same way that articles have.I think what’s meant here is that thus far, blogs and Wikipedia have often been the de facto media for distributing this kind of work, because traditional journals didn’t have a way to accommodate it–something that folks are now trying to change.
ak169808 - October 6, 2010 at 4:54 pm
history_grrrl is retarded
jenrgriffiths - October 8, 2010 at 4:59 am
Born-digital means records, items, things that are created in a digital way first (such as a digital photo). The digital item not the physical reproduction (such as a print out) is the original. (Which raises all sorts of questions about most published things, just as an aside!)It is hard to get your head around this stuff and I don’t think there is something to point to to say that is it. The point about “digital” anything is that it is what we make it. Which is probably why it has struggled to be taken seriously in academia. However, professional, academically trained historians use all the same knowledge and skills to create scholarship whether it be written or more “digital”. It surely should be the scholarship that is judged, not the format.