Engaging Digital Scholarship: Thoughts on Evaluating Multimedia Scholarship

This article offers a critical survey of the rhetoric and realities of contemporary institutional struggles to come to terms with multimedia scholarship. As richly mediated and computationally enabled scholarship—frequently but not exclusively under the banner of the digital humanities—struggles to gain acceptance in higher education, what standards, values, and best practices can ensure the rigor of emerging scholarly modes? Building on their work as coeditors of the online journal Vectors, the authors put forward requirements that are essential to the future of emerging scholarship: respect for experimentation and emerging genres, appreciation for transdisciplinary and collaborative work, the updating of models of citation and peer review, rewards for openness and contribution to a public commons, and valuing the development of tools and infrastructure. The article concludes with the scholarly resource Critical Commons as a provocative example of the movement toward researching in public. (SA and TM)