Half-Baked: The State of Evaluation in the Digital Humanities

Abstract

The American Literature Scholar in the Digital Age, Edited by Amy E. Earheart and Andy Jewell. University of Michigan Press and University of Michigan Library, 2011. Switching Codes: Thinking Through Digital Technology in the Humanities and the Arts, Edited by Thomas Bartscherer and Roderick Coover. University of Chicago Press, 2011. These two very different books tell us much about a current tension in the humanities concerning how we define and evaluate digital scholarship. Certainly, writing about such matters in digital humanities (DH)1 is not new: Debates in the Digital Humanities (2011) considers how we have currently and historically defined the field; A Companion to Digital Humanities (2004) and A Companion to Digital Literary Studies (2007) consider how technology has changed access, infrastructure, methodologies, and the nature of research in literary study; journals such as Literary and Linguistic Computing and digital humanities quarterly, as well as more traditional journals such as the Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Modernism/Modernity, and now PMLA, among others, have published articles on innovative theories and practices in literary scholarship in the digital age—many for almost a decade now.2 Yet The American Literature Scholar in the Digital Age and Switching Codes are unique and valuable as collections whose historicizing illuminates current fissures in discussions about the ways that the academic community can evaluate digital scholarship in the humanities.