Peer Reviewing Digital Archives: the NINES model

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.

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.