Review: Scalar and Omeka

Abstract

Scalar and Omeka : https://scalar.me/anvc/; http://omeka.org The migration of academic scholarship to digital platforms over the past two decades has seen its share of ups and downs. Advocates of digitization and online publication have pointed out the lower costs of publishing, the democratizing potential of the Internet, and the increased opportunities for collaboration and iterative work afforded by digital and online tools. At the same time, critics of online publication have pointed to questions of rigor and peer review, along with dilemmas such as how to preserve and cite works that are inherently unstable, how to credit individuals involved in collaborative efforts, and how to assess work that by its nature involves ongoing change and multiple versions. To address some of the challenges of digital scholarship, scholarly societies have adopted standards for assessment, including the “Guidelines for the Evaluation of Digital Scholarship in Art and Architectural History” developed by the Society of Architectural Historians in partnership with the College Art Association and released in 2016.1 At the same time, a number of university presses are investing in the development of platforms that reimagine the process of publishing peer-reviewed born-digital work. Take, for instance, the recently released platform Manifold Scholarship, which is being developed by the University of Minnesota Press in collaboration with GC Digital Scholarship Lab at the City University of New York. Like many such platforms, Manifold is open source, meaning the original source code for the software is freely and publicly available for anyone to adopt or modify. In the same spirit, this software departs from the print and even e-book models for textual academic scholarship in that the document remains dynamic, collaborative, and iterative, allowing for commentary from a community of readers as well as revision and expansion of the project by the author beyond its first release. Even as Manifold and …