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I was tied up with teaching and other matters last week and haven’t been able to contribute so far to this very interesting set of exchanges.
Just a brief note about conference reviewers. I put out a call for reviewers when I was programme chair of DH 2012 (in Hamburg) with the specific aim of increasing geographic and linguistic coverage (no difference in criteria were applied then, nor should they be now). There was, then at least, no clear consensus in ADHO about how reviewers should be selected – and it was very much down to the chair each year. Anecdotal evidence suggested that there were fairly significant differences from year to year, reflecting perhaps the differences in how the field operates in different academic and geographic domains (should reviewers have a PhD? Should they have formal academic posts? Should they have published/’built’ something deemed relevant to the field etc etc).
The thing that struck me at the time was that the reaction to the call in 2012 was positive, but I had a disproportionately high number of requests from people at U.S. institutions, and in spite of some fairly proactive encouragement I didn’t get the flood of reviewers in Spanish, French and other languages I’d hoped to achieve, to balance things up a bit. Doubtless I made mistakes, and sadly GO::DH didn’t exist then, but the feedback I had at the time led me to believe that there are a whole host of issues which need to be addressed, things like: cultural differences regarding putting yourself forward (much akin to Marin Dacos’s comment about self-referencing in his essay ‘La stratégie du Sauna finlandais’); different motivations (depending on which academic culture they work in, people do not have the same disposable time, nor do they get equal credit for volunteering their time in this way); not to mention of course the long-recognised issue of the unwritten (if not always consistent) models for how an international DH conference abstract should be written.
In summary: I never heard anyone apply different rules by linguistic group in my years on the programme committee, but there were implicit differences which encouraged a bias in the makeup of reviewers, and which need to be addressed on numerous levels.
I realise that this is too late this time round, but I’d be happy to give feedback in future discussions.
Best
Paul
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Paul Spence
Senior Lecturer
Department Education Lead / Programme Convenor MA in Digitial Humanities
Department of Digital Humanities
King's College London
26-29 Drury Lane
London
WC2B 5RL
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/ddh/research/index.aspx
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/ddh/study/pgt/madh/index.aspx
Twitter: @dhpaulspence (English)/@hdpaulspence (castellano)
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