In this presentation at the Brown University Library, Cheryl Ball outlines the history of digital scholarship in the humanities and traces the accompanying changed to tenure and promotion practices.
Exploring two decades of evaluating digital scholarship for tenure and promotion (in the humanities)
1. Exploring Two Decades
evaluating Digital Scholarship
for Tenure and Promotion
(in the Humanities)
Dr. Cheryl E. Ball
Associate Professor of Digital Publishing Studies
West Virginia University
@s2ceball
4. Names for this Field
• computers and composition
• computers & writing
• new media composition
• digital writing
• digital rhetoric
• digital literacies
• techno-pedagogy
“Views from a Distance” - a word-cloud
based webtext on the disciplinary history
of writing studies by Derek Mueller.
(http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/16.2/top
oi/mueller/)
9. Early Digital Tenure
Guidelines
CCCC Position Statement on Promotion and Tenure
Guidelines for Work with Technology (1998)
Candidate should:
• Educate others
• Explain their work in terms of traditional scholarship
• Network with technologists
14. Rise of “Digital Humanities”
1. traditional (online) scholarship about DH
2. DH projects (but not “counted”)
• tools (Zotero, etc.)
• grants (ODH)
• collaboration (in “lone-genius” fields)
• collections/archives (NINES, etc.)
• public humanities (social media & open peer review, etc.)
15. Updated Guidelines (2013)
• for institutions
• for committees
• for T&P candidates
MLA Guidelines for Evaluating Work
in Digital Humanities and Digital Medi
https://www.mla.org/guidelines_evaluation_digital
21. job portfolio
@ MTU ‘03
3rd-year review & job
portfolio @ USU ‘06
tenure portfolio
@ ILSTU ‘09
Notas del editor
nice Brown, MFA in late 90s, postmodern literary theory —> HT theory
ended up in e-lit (1st ETD): ETD (sciences) and e-lit work pushed T&P changes in digital writing.
In this talk: outline field of digital writing studies to trace changes in T&P practices and guidelines.
Kairos is fulcrum for T&P changes in digital writing
History:
1996 (not first, but longest - 20th anniv),
grad students, HT theory,
completely online, “webtexts”
Independent, open-access (libre), collab peer review
10-15% acceptance rate (could talk all day about how…)
primary audience of Kairos
— after MFA, PhD in RTC (intersects: RC, TC, PW, CW)
— RQs: how rhetorical writing makes meaning and is taught through and with digital technologies
— field is now dated back to 1975 when the first article about c&c came out: Ellen W. Nold's “Fear and Trembling: The Humanist Approaches the Computer” published in CCC. First journal, C&C, started in 1983. Kairos, then, comes along when the field was established but with the advent of the Web.
— other journals were also doing Web-based work, or even networked-writing work (Postmodern Culture, 1990, email), many in sciences, but sharing written text, print-like scholarship in the same tradition as ever.
This is why Kairos is unique: webtexts, from the beginning
SHOW EXAMPLES
Not surprisingly, getting tenure by publishing webtexts has always been at the forefront of authors’ and editors’ minds.
apocryphal stories, turn out true: Marcy Bauman (2002), Dan Anderson (2003), Ray Seimens.
first issue dedicated to tenure in digital scholarship: Spring 1997.
even tho guidelines existed prior to the three examples I mentioned earlier, they weren’t always helpful because (1) incumbent on candidate, (2) external evaluators not always called (and not many of those), (3) local guidelines didn’t accommodate
—> CCCC tenure narratives
2005 study (now being redone) showed that NO TT scholars in digital writing studies got tenure based on webtextual work. Only one or two published a digital piece pre-tenure.
why digital tenure portfolio? (webtexts and OA work)
(Editor of Kairos for 8 years by then; my first publication - elite - was in it)
(—> ALL T&P applications for CAS are required to be electronic, starting Fall 2014)
other schools: Findlay, Kent State
Although less and less of my scholarship is in webtextual form, it’s taking three radically different directions:
— blogs, columns, and alternative publication venues
— digital project administration born from grants, which produces white papers and tools
— print-based articles (that I cross-publish on my OA website) on scholarly publishing
THIS IS WHERE DH PROJECTS COME IN…
circa 2011, began DH takeover of MLA
by then, lots of print-like scholarship about DH, and lots of DH projects, but latter didn’t count for tenure.
PROBLEM: still counting in re traditional forms of scholarship (e.g., Todd Taylor vs. Bump Halbritter) — Lee & Selfe article//WVU English rewrites
Like AHA recently did, all of these organizations semi-regularly update their guidelines to accommodate changes in genres, technologies, and processes used in digital scholarship.
—> GO briefly to MLA site
- story of digital portfolio
change in tenure guidelines
working AGAINST MLA wiki genres
i can talk at length about rhetorical reading strategies…. (most of my scholarship)
At each school, I had a different need for presenting my materials for the job market and for tenure committees.
redesign of tenure portfolio, post-tenure & again on the 2012 job market
And, because I couldn’t resist playing up my personality even amidst making the design more professional and updated to mid-2010s design standards,
I have 6 head shots that rotate, each with different expressions. I have always said that people need to know what they’re getting when they get me, and my portfolio is how I express my work all in a single place.