Cathy Davidson has a summary article in CTWatch Quarterly titled, Data Mining, Collaboration, and Institutional Infrastructure for Transforming Research and Teaching in the Human Sciences and Beyond. The article makes some good points about how we have to rethink research in the humanities in the face of digital evidence.
Bibliographic work, translation, and indexical scholarship should also have a place in the reward system of the humanities, as they did in the nineteenth century. The split between “interpretation” or “theoretical” or “analytical” work on the one hand and, on the other, “archival work” or “editing” falls apart when we consider the theoretical, interpretive choices that go into decisions about what will be digitized and how. Do we go with taxonomy (formal categorizing systems as evolved by trained archivists)? Or folksonomy (categories arrived at by users, many of which offer less precise organization than professional indexes but often more interesting ones that point out ambiguities and variabilities of usage and application)?
We also need to rethink paper as the gold standard of the humanities. If scholarship is better presented in an interactive 3-D data base, why does the scholar need to translate that work to a printed page in order for it to “count” towards tenure and promotion? It makes no sense at all if our academic infrastructures are so rigid that they require a “dumbing down” of our research in order for it to be visible enough for tenure and promotion committees.
Davidson talks about a first generation digital humanities and then makes a Web 2.0 argument about the overwhelming amount of data being gathered and new paradigms. I’m not convinced she really understands the achievements of the first generation, if there is such a clear generational division, there is no mention of the TEI or the work on literary text analysis and publishing.