On 04/02/14 05:03, Marin Dacos wrote:
I was also surprised to discover that Hypotheses http://www.hypotheses.org was refused for inclusion in the nominee because it was not _created_ in 2013. For those who don't know Hypotheses, here is a short presentation :
Hi Marin,
To give you the background on this, the committee all recognised Hypotheses.org as an extremely important and excellent publication platforms for academic blogs. But we took the decision before nominations that were announced that if we could not find any sign of extremely major updates, publication, or launch in 2013 that this would rule the nomination out for the awards for that year. We couldn't find any such indication for hypotheses.org itself and made the decision that just adding new blogs to the site didn't really count as a major infrastructural change. There was no malice intended in this decision, and the number of nominations falling at this hurdle was significant. (There were some resources which hadn't been touched since the late 1990s nominated!) Yes, this puts a focus of the awards on a year by year basis. This has downsides but also highlights that DH is a continually evolving and cutting edge field. That is part of the awareness we wish to highlight.
The rejection of Hypotheses as nominee for DH awards is not related to our openness to language diversity, but to a strong focus on novelty in our field. That means that we do not focus on structure, nor in infrastructures. But DH should be the first community considering that cyberinfrastructures are very important for our future, our sustainability and our capacity of lasting (or capacity to stay?).
Exactly, the rejection of hypotheses.org was only to do with date, certainly not to do with any aspect of language diversity. (Indeed, as I said in my reply to Isabel we are actively trying to encourage that, in our poor stumbling ways.)
You are right that the DH Awards are focussed on novelty (though don't judge that particularly as a criteria -- a site can be nominated that uses quite old technology, if it was released in that year), and I see that this has both benefits and drawbacks. I don't see how we could have a set of annual awards which did not explicitly rely on the annual-ness of those awards though. The committee wants clear and easy-to-determine reasons for whittling down of the nominations provided since voters have a hard enough time looking at just a few resources per category. Other suggestions are appreciated.
Best wishes, James (founder of DH Awards)