I’m part of a search committee for a Digital Humanities programmer and during discussions with recent candidates, I’ve been struck by the phrase “scholarly practice.”
My colleague builds projects that adhere to certain standards accepted within the DH community, which as a result create a scholarly product. For example, this year we’ve teamed up with a History faculty member to create a scholarly edition of a manuscript collection that I curate in Special Collections. The students working on the project will encode the letters using TEI and have worked as a team with the faculty member to make editorial decisions related to that mark up. All of the letters will be scanned, transcribed and encoded using TEI. A researcher will be able to see connections and relationships among people and places across the collection.
At the same time, I’m the project manager for another digitization project. I don’t have outside partners for this project, in the way I do the for the DH project. All the same, students scan and transcribe letters from a 19th century manuscript collection. Once a group of scans and transcriptions are edited and corrected we upload them to our Omeka website. There have been a few students who have written essays using the site’s content and those works are posted on the site as well. But we’ve decided not to mark the letters up using TEI for several reasons: time, expertise and money.
Within a year of beginning the project we uploaded 200 scans and transcription and are continuing to work through the 2,000 letter collection. My question is…
Is my project an example of scholarly practice? Or am I working in an old digitization project management model? Should all digitization projects fall under the umbrella of scholarly practice? Is that the third frontier of digitization?
1. We have a scanner, let’s scan! (1990s)
2. User driven digitization projects.(2000s)
3. Faculty and DH projects. (2013+)
As we talk more and more about resources, people and financial, connecting a potential project to a faculty member’s class and research interests seems a sound strategic priority. But part of my job is providing access to collections that researchers don’t know are there, and digitization can be a wonderful way to do that.
Are the days of simply providing increased access to content by digitizing collection content over? One could say we’re in a chicken and egg situation. If a faculty member doesn’t know a collection exists, he or she can’t build a DH project around that content. But if digitizing content and putting it on the web is not by itself scholarly practice, but rather an act of encouraging scholarly practice as a positive result, where does that leave Special Collections?
Can we be the providers of content for a DH department to build scholarly editions and develop scholarly practice? Can we continue to digitize and create access to materials without a DH component to our efforts? Do these two paths and their goals contradict each other?
I think instead, they compliment each other. Staff in Special Collections must bring potential projects to a DH department and interested faculty and work with them to leverage our unique resources. Scanning on demand and the launch of smaller projects can lead to DH collaborations, which in turn provide increased access to special collections materials.
I’d be interested to know what others think!