Where Credit Is Due: Preconditions for the Evaluation of Collaborative Digital Scholarship

Abstract

In assessing digital humanities scholarship for purposes of tenure and promotion, committees must focus as much on process as on product, because digital work is situated in especially complex and collaborative networks of production and reception. Necessary shifts in evaluative practice require us to rethink internalized notions of solitary authorship, develop new standards for attribution, and revise institutional policies that govern intellectual property. This essay offers a set of preconditions for the evaluation of digital projects and argues that fair and full acknowledgment of the work of others (including non–faculty members and alternative academic contributors) will contribute to a scholarly communications ecosystem in which new work in the humanities is better fostered, designed, distributed, and preserved. (BN)