Category Archives: digital scholarship

Digital Scholarship: Moving Forward while Looking Back

The readings about digital scholarship in the humanities this week have me thinking about  the future. As Hitchcock suggest that the book is being replaced by digital texts, I wonder what scholarship, print or digital, will look like in 25 – 50 years from now. Will books still be printed? Will something else come along that replaces digital texts? I cannot see into the future, but barring some type of catastrophic event, I cannot envision the technology we have today regressing. I can only picture it advancing, as it has been doing over the past 50 years. I feel as though right now we are in the middle of a transformation and in the near future, academics will no longer question the legitimacy of digital scholarship, as it will become fully integrated into our everyday lives.

As younger generations who are used to utilizing the web for research start moving to publishing online, as has already been happening, “traditional” historians will likely either jump on board, or get left behind. The argument that digital scholarship is less credible has been stated many times, and also disproven. With Will Thomas‘ and Dougherty, et al.’s writings about the peer reviewing practices on digital scholarship, it is obvious that credible and reviewed work can be digital.

By embracing the open culture of the web, more readers will have access to historical writing, which I think is a good thing. Academics are trapped between moving forward with the technology available to them to present their writings, teachings, and other forms of scholarships, and being held accountable to out-dated standards that privilege the monograph books. I agree with Galarza, Heppler, and Seefeldt’s Call to Redefine  Scholarship in the Digital Turn, as they encourage the American Historical Association to take a serious look at the current state of digital history, in order to keep up with modern tools available to historians. Their proposal has an emphasis on reevaluating the current standards for tenure and promotion by history departments, which speaks to the underlying issue that digital scholarship is still not taken as seriously as traditional methods.

My hope is that in 50 years or less, the discussions we have today on digital scholarship will be unnecessary, and we will look back on this time much like we look back on other innovations in history. By creating credible and well-researched digital history projects, as well as advocating for a change in the academy, digital scholarship will hopefully be as accepted just as much, if not more, than the print book in the years to come.