Rome Wasn't Digitized in a Day - Council on Library and Information ...

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editor and a strong board of respected digital humanists. Both these suggestions illustrate the
importance of staff<strong>in</strong>g as a key component of any <strong>in</strong>frastructure.
New Evaluation and Incentive Models for Digital Scholarship and Publish<strong>in</strong>g
While the ACLS report argued that young scholars would need to be offered more “formal venues and
opportunities for tra<strong>in</strong><strong>in</strong>g and encouragement” (ACLS 2006) <strong>in</strong> order to successfully pursue new
digital scholarship, the CSHE report on scholarly communication practices found no evidence
suggest<strong>in</strong>g that technologically sophisticated graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, or assistant
professors were eagerly pursu<strong>in</strong>g digital publish<strong>in</strong>g opportunities <strong>in</strong> place of traditional venues. “In
fact, as arguably the most vulnerable populations <strong>in</strong> the scholarly community,” Harley et al. imparted,
“one would expect them to hew to the norms of their chosen discipl<strong>in</strong>e, and they do” (Harley et al.
2010, 9). Senior scholars who already had tenure were undertak<strong>in</strong>g most of the greatest digital
<strong>in</strong>novation, they discovered. The irony rema<strong>in</strong>ed, however, that young scholars were often expected by
their senior colleagues to transform professions that would still as yet not recognize digital scholarship.
A recent article by Stephen Nichols has also criticized this lack of support for both produc<strong>in</strong>g and
evaluat<strong>in</strong>g digital scholarship among the humanities:
While attitudes more favourable to the needs of digital humanities projects are slowly evolv<strong>in</strong>g,
we have yet to see a general acceptance of new approaches. Indeed, even where digital projects
have been embraced, evidence suggests that attitudes from traditional or analogue scholarship
cont<strong>in</strong>ue to <strong>in</strong>fluence the way projects are evaluated, a practice that younger, untenured
colleagues often f<strong>in</strong>d <strong>in</strong>timidat<strong>in</strong>g. At least as far as the demands of humanities credential<strong>in</strong>g
are concerned, the dom<strong>in</strong>ion of the typewriter has yet to give way to that of the computer,
metaphorically speak<strong>in</strong>g (Nichols 2009).
This criticism was confirmed by the research of the LAIRAH project (Warwick et al. 2008b), which
illustrated that many scholars creat<strong>in</strong>g digital humanities projects had received little support or
recognition from their <strong>in</strong>stitutions. Further evidence of this trend was demonstrated by a workshop at
the 2010 Modern Language Association (MLA) Conference on assess<strong>in</strong>g digital scholarship <strong>in</strong>
nontraditional formats as detailed by Edmond and Schreibman (2010). When the first case study at the
MLA workshop presented a digital edition of a little-known poet complete with extensive scholarly
apparatus, the first comment from a workshop participant was that the creation of such an edition was
not scholarship but service. This attitude was reflected throughout the CSHE case study of archaeology
as well, and many archaeologists suggested that much digital work was a form of service, not
scholarship. “The creation of a scholarly edition was a service activity, not a scholarly one regardless
of the medium of presentation,” Edmond and Schreibman reported, add<strong>in</strong>g that “the workshop
facilitators immediately realized that the battle l<strong>in</strong>es were far from fixed and that hav<strong>in</strong>g a work <strong>in</strong>
digital form only served to re<strong>in</strong>force certa<strong>in</strong> exist<strong>in</strong>g prejudices rather than allow for a widened
scholarly horizon” (Edmond and Schreibman 2010).
One reason that Edmond and Schreibman (2010) suggested for the lack of “trust” <strong>in</strong> digital resources
as real scholarship is that such resources are still perceived by many scholars as ephemeral and
transient. They proposed that the development of susta<strong>in</strong>able <strong>in</strong>frastructure for digital scholarship
might help alleviate some of this distrust. In addition, Edmond and Schreibman po<strong>in</strong>ted out that even if
the framework for pr<strong>in</strong>t-based scholarship was so “embedded <strong>in</strong> the academic and <strong>in</strong>stitutional systems
that support it as to be nearly <strong>in</strong>visible,” it was still an <strong>in</strong>frastructure <strong>in</strong> itself that many scholars had
long s<strong>in</strong>ce realized was beg<strong>in</strong>n<strong>in</strong>g to break: