To the Editor:
Jennifer Howard’s Hot Type column “No Reviews of Digital Scholarship = No Respect” (The Chronicle, May 23) identifies a key impediment to work in digital humanities. Recognizing the importance of peer review in digital scholarship, the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln is addressing this matter in various ways:
• by creating a cultural climate on campus that provides for rigorous assessment of digital humanities work and gives confidence to junior scholars that strong scholarship in this field will be rewarded;
• by creating some of the necessary peer-review mechanisms still underdeveloped in the field at large through the creation of the Nebraska Digital Workshop (an annual event, providing extensive critiques and showcasing the most distinguished work in digital humanities by early-career scholars);
• by devising guidelines for the assessment of digital scholarship meant to be useful broadly within the academy;
• and by the involvement of several faculty members in Nines, a peer-reviewing body for digital work in the long 19th century.
Working with the Association for Documentary Editing, faculty members at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities will soon transform Documentary Editing, currently a print-based journal, into a peer-reviewed online publication that will open a space, beginning in 2011, for scholars to publish small-scale peer-reviewed scholarly editions, a development that should be significant for the fields of both digital humanities and scholarly editing. To aid in credentialing digital humanities scholarship, the center is in the final stages of developing a digital-humanities certificate at the graduate level and plans to offer an undergraduate minor in digital humanities.
These steps are important given the complex combination of knowledge of both subject matter and technical approaches necessary to produce adequate reviewers of new digital scholarship—work that is protean and likely to be increasingly dominant in years to come.
Kenneth M. Price
Katherine L. Walter
Co-directors
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities
University of Nebraska at Lincoln
Lincoln, Neb.
