Digital Humanities

DH2010

King's College London, 3rd - 6th July 2010

[Image: KCL Photo Collage]
[Image: London Photo Collage (Somerset House; Globe Theatre; Millennium Bridge; Tate Modern)]

Peer Reviewing Digital Archives: the NINES model

See Abstract in PDF, XML, or in the Programme

Wheeles, Dana
University of Virginia
dw6h@cms.virginia.edu

Mandell, Laura
Miami University of Ohio
laura.mandell@gmail.com

The aim of this workshop is to invite digital humanists to work together in figuring out how to peer review digital scholarship.  It springs from three impulses.  The first has to do with the day-to-day work of NINES.  Dana Wheeles is Project Manager and Laura Mandell Associate Director of NINES, the Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-century Electronic Scholarship (http://www.nines.org). Dana and Laura are engaged in helping scholars figure out how to create state-of-the-art scholarly editions, on a much smaller scale than King’s Centre for Computing in the Humanities.  We would like to help people who have projects in early-to-mid stages of development learn about standards and best practices for their digital archives, editions, or artworks.  Second, Dana Wheeles works with sites to develop a robust metadata system that makes possible their interoperability in the NINES universe.  She will discuss metadata encoded in NINES RDF and demonstrate its practical values.  Third, as Chair of the MLA Committee on Information Technology this year, Laura Mandell participated in an excellent workshop for department chairs and junior faculty, created by Susan Schreibman, about reviewing digital work for promotion and tenure. Organizations such as NINES can help junior scholars obtain the rewards they deserve for digital work through thoughtful peer review and documentation.  We invite members of Promotion and Tenure committees as well as heads of humanities organizations to attend this workshop.

  • 1st Part: Laura Mandell will present the MLA standards for Electronic scholarly editions as well as information from the Electronic Literature Organization.  Best practices for sustainability culled from articles in the library sciences will also be presented, and then participants will spend some time working together looking at real projects in order to figure out how to implement this information practically.  We will sketch out for each site examined workflow and interface design.
  • 2nd Part: Dana Wheeles will demonstrate how to create the metadata needed for inclusion in NINES.  Though participants may be planning to submit their work to NINES, they need not be working in nineteenth-century studies for this demonstration to be valuable.  For those who are developing sites or archives, learning what metadata is needed at early stages of development is a boon, and for those who wish to sponsor an organization like NINES, or incorporate NINES practices into an existing organization, our metadata and indexing systems provide an interesting model.
  • 3rd Part: Finally, for the last third of the workshop, workshop leaders and participants will all work together in peer-reviewing digital archives and sites.  In the process, we will sketch out the kinds of documentation needed for selecting and encouraging the best digital work as well as for creating in the space of interdisciplinary digital humanities a robust set of practices for supporting the professional development of the scholars who contribute. The draft we write at this workshop will go forward to be worked on during the NINES Summer Institute, 2011.

This workshop is directed at two audiences: producers of electronic scholarship and art, on the one hand, and arbiters of it, on the other.  The latter are those who are actively engaged in creating and reforming the institutional structures in which these projects will live and thrive.  They might be editors of journals, managers of specific institutional structures, directors of disciplinary organizations, librarians, bibliographers, chairs of departments, or interested collaborators.

Half day workshop: Afternoon, 6 July.

© 2010 Centre for Computing in the Humanities

Last Updated: 30-06-2010