Tuesday

Digital Media at the MLA

I attended MLA this year in San Francisco.  Working as a new member of the MLA Committee on Information Technology (CIT), I attended several sessions connecting the university disciplines of language and literature with digital media, promising to blog them here at AIMS.  I will be gradually blogging summaries and impressions of these sessions, and I will at moments in these blogs stop to define terms, point to further resources, and make theoretical observations.  Like Samuel Richardson 250 years before now, I’m going to mark the take-aways, in case you want to skip right to them.  Here’s one:

Alan Liu: “Online reading can only narrowly be understood as reading–as narrowly, say, as a holiday meal with family can be defined as eating.”

Links: quotation source / related panels / the transliteracies project

The first session I attended was a pre-convention workshop arranged by the CIT called “Evaluating Digital Work for Tenure and Promotion: A Workshop for Evaluators and Candidates.” You may access the web site and wiki for this workshop containing links that will take you to official statements issued by the MLA and CALL (Language Learning) about how to judge digital media in tenure cases (and beyond) as well as some of the workshop materials – detailed notes are coming.

We all pretty much agreed at this workshop and subsequent panels that these statements are too general to serve as copy for P&T policy manuals at any given institution: they sometimes state the obvious, e.g., that a peer-reviewed journal online should count as much as a peer-reviewed article appearing in print, valued according to the online venue’s stated number of submissions and percentage of rejections.  Unfortunately – and this lament was repeated throughout the IT panels that I attended – the obvious still needs to be said.  We are all grateful to MLA and CALL for issuing official statements that can set individual departments and institutions working on adding to their written tenure and promotion guidelines some explicit articulations of the value of digital work.

There were a really stellar and illustrious workshop attendees – chairs, candidates, people on the job market.  Many excellent questions and ideas circulated at this workshop, as well as some hands-on experience in evaluating tenure dossiers containing digital materials.  During the hands-on exercises, we found ourselves wanting more information from the candidates themselves so that we could in fact distinguish whether specific projects should be counted as research, teaching or service.  Those distinctions still serve us well in the discipline of English literature (in my opinion), but they become somewhat murky in the disciplines of the modern languages where research is often conducted via teaching.

One highlight for me was a moment when I realized that department chairs need to offer external and internal reviewers detailed instructions on how to evaluate what they see.  At Research 1 universities, it isn’t uncommon for tenure cases to be turned down at the higher levels which have been wholeheartedly supported by specific departments, and so candidates, external reviewers, and chairs face the added burden of having to educate deans and provosts through documentation and explanation.

Exhaustive documentation???

Well, really, nor more documentation about the value of digital research should be need than is needed for printed monographs and articles.  But here is the problem.  As Associate Director of NINES (http://www.nines.org), a peer-reviewing organization for digital scholarship in the field of nineteenth-century studies, I could look at digital projects listed on a CV and say, “That has passed intensive peer-review,” no one else in my group knew that fact, and nothing on the CV even suggested that there was such an organization as NINES.  Candidates need to explain: what institutional bodies have ratified your work, and exactly what form has that ratification taken?  But also, I’m going back to NINES to discuss the possibility of issuing to the sites that NINES has reviewed documentation explaining exactly what NINES is and does as well as evaluations for specific online projects that can become part of those projects wherever they live.

Imagine if a P & T Committee or a department chair could see, upon pulling up a digital edition of  (I’m just making this up) Henry James’s prefaces, a prominent link going out to a written evaluation composed by the illustrious scholars constituting the NINES editorial boards.  That would help everyone as does a press or journal imprimatur.

The CIT hopes that another such workshop will be scheduled for the 2009 MLA, and in my view it would be great if it were attended numerous chairs of language and literature departments.  One chair of English who attended this year was asked if he currently had junior faculty coming up for promotion who were engaged in editing digital editions or creating digital archives.  He responded, “No, not yet, but the writing’s on the wall.”  As another participant said, junior scholars are building the digital infrastructure for us, and we need to figure out ways to inspire and reward that important work.  Would that more leaders in our fields be so prescient as these.

O.k., what’s an infrastructure??  It’s the underlying arrangement of things that makes scholarly work possible, all the tools (texts, locators of texts, writing and publishing processes).  Right now the infrastructure for language and literature professors consists in libraries, rare-books rooms, university presses, forms for and research tools for producing textual apparatus.  But as Jerome McGann said during a roundtable session on scholarly editing in the digital age, a later panel,

The complete editorial reconstruction of our literary inheritance online is going to happen.

Links: quotation source

Junior scholars are going to be engaged in that reconstruction, and the future of the literary is at stake.

More coming, more panel summaries . . . .