Digital Scholarship in the Field of Church History

Abstract

Digital Scholarship in the Field of Church History Laura Morreale, Jennifer Paxton, Joel Kalvesmaki, Jeanne-Nicole Mellon Saint-Laurent, Miri Ribin, and Stephen M. Koeth C.S.C. HMML Authority File. Hill Museum and Manuscript Library. HMML Authority File. 2002. https://haf.vhmml.org. Julia Hillner, Dirk Rohmann, et al. The Migration of Faith: Clerical Exile in Late Antiquity. 2018. https://www.clericalexile.org. Rowan Dorin. Corpus Synodalium: Local Ecclesiastical Legislation in Medieval Europe. 2021. https://www.corpus-synodalium.com. Maria Mazzenga. The American Catholic History Research Center. The Catholic University of America. American Catholic History Classroom. 2022. https://cuomeka.wrlc.org. As we enter the third decade of the twenty-first century, the economy of knowledge exchange is now securely situated in the online medium. As the landscape of academic knowledge sharing continues to shift, scholars now rely upon the online medium in their everyday working lives, even if they do not consider themselves digital scholars. Every time a scholar searches through a database or internet-based catalogue from the library, he or she is entering into a computer-based approach to knowledge acquisition and production. The powers afforded to us by digital tools in turn shape our expectations about how we work; likewise, the more born-digital material we consume, the more likely it is that we will expand upon and express our scholarship in digitally-inflected formats. Online academia has changed how we receive, reuse, and cite scholarship in our own subfields. Nowadays, we are more likely to follow up on a footnote by searching for pdfs in an online library than to spend hours in the periodical reading room of the brick-and-mortar one, searching out those same materials. Additionally, we also rely upon born-digital finding aids, curated online corpora, and even projects that explore a particular research question that might open the door to other avenues of scholarly activity. Electronic communication has transformed how we share knowledge because it is both instantaneous and remains open to ongoing modification. No matter how analogue one’s practice may be, scholarly ideas are now shared, refined, and expressed in a digital world. Like colleagues in all scholarly communities, historians of the Church have witnessed the proliferation of computer-based work, and many have come to depend upon resources and research outputs that are available only in online formats. Although this scholarship does indeed trace its origins to traditional forms of research and learning and shares many of its same motivations, digital work is distinctive in a number of ways. With the power to organize and present large amounts of data, it is also interactive, communal, and team based, and it promotes accessible and open knowledge sharing. Given the importance of digital scholarship, it should [End Page 132] be more fully incorporated into systems of rewarding scholarly productivity, and those who produce it should be granted due recognition. With this in mind, the editorial board of the Catholic Historical Review is adding a review section for born-digital scholarship that addresses the journal’s purview, that is, “the history of the universal Church.” What is digital scholarship?1 Since peer review remains fundamental to all serious intellectual endeavors, the CHR section dedicated to born-digital scholarship both recognizes these newer expressions of knowledge and integrates them within the more traditional format of the scholarly journal review. Digital work is not an either/or proposition. It does not replace previous forms of scholarship, but rather accompanies and relies upon them even as it ushers in and facilitates new ways of considering, aggregating, and analyzing the materials that serve as witness to our collective pasts. Digital scholarship transcends mere digitization or database construction; instead, scholars are now using online tools and resources to study previously unknown or inaccessible materials and to use older sources in ways that were previously unimagined. Like many approaches to scholarship, machine-aided historical analysis has its own backstory. An AHA-sponsored blog post from the early 2000s put forth an early definition of digital history with an emphasis on the analytical possibilities of the medium as well as its power to disseminate information.2 Over time, the origin story of digital history has...