The full call for participation is online here: http://www.dh.unibe.ch/en/2014/08/software-scholarship/

With best wishes,

Tara Andrews

--

Prof. Dr. Tara L Andrews

Digital Humanities, Universität Bern

Computation and software analysis have entered nearly every imaginable field of scholarship in the last decades, in a variety of forms from digital publication of results to computational modelling embedded in experimental work. In each of these digital outputs – be it an interactive publication with mapping of relevant geo-referenced data, or perhaps a statistical program for the categorization of millions of books according to their literary genre – there is some manifestation directly in the computer code of the scholarly thought that underlies the project, of the intellectual argument around which the outcome is based.

The fact that scholarly software includes scholarly content is reasonably well-accepted. What remains controversial is the attempt at identification, in any particular instance, of what scholarly contribution has been made by a piece of software. Its makers tend to express the scholarship in writing separate from the software itself, if they even make explicit at all the scholarly reasoning that went into the code; its reviewers and users tend either to treat the software as a ‘black box’, opaque to informed scrutiny and therefore to be looked on with grave suspicion, or to deny that this particular software has any scholarship inherent to the source code. Given that our mechanisms for identifying and evaluating the scholarship within computer code are nearly nonexistent, we must ask: how do intellectual arguments — how does scholarship — come to be expressed in the software of digital humanities? How does this scholarship, so evident in theory but so elusive in practice, fit into the scientific process of advancement of knowledge?

Related to the question of the expression of scholarship in software, and in other forms of digital publication as well, is the question of how to evaluate it. This topic will be the focus of a half-day roundtable, Peer Review for Digital Scholarly Work, to be held on 30 January 2015. Digital scholarly works such as Digital Editions, Digital Libraries, Digital Exhibitions, Data Visualization, Geographical Information Systems and the like are increasingly frequent in the Humanities, as main or secondary output of research projects; the question of how best to evaluate them takes on ever greater importance. At the moment, researchers doing digital scholarly work are usually unable to obtain academic credit for their work—in order to obtain scholarly recognition, they must additionally publish a “normal” article in a print-based journal about their digital work.

As universities and national research funding agencies across the world move toward encouraging more digital scholarship in the humanities, there is an urgent need to discuss the criteria and benchmarks that should be in place for evaluating digital scholarly work. We welcome contributions about existing initiatives in this domain as well as more theoretical contributions that treat the topic of peer review of digital scholarly work.