Elisa Beshero-Bondar PRO
Professor of Digital Humanities and Chair of the Digital Media, Arts, and Technology Program at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College.
Digital Scholarship for Keeps:
What Matters
and What Lasts?
Elisa Beshero-Bondar
Professor of Digital Humanities, Penn State Erie
(used to be Assoc Prof. of English, Pitt-Greensburg)
Mastodon: epyllia@indieweb.social | X and Bluesky: @epyllia
MLA 2024 Panel 404: Evaluating Digital Scholarship Today: Problems and Solutions
6 January 2024: 8:30 AM - 9:45 AM
Background image generated by DALL-E via Bing, in response to prompt about this talk: 2023-12-22
Digital scholarship for keeps: what matters and what lasts?
By Elisa Beshero-Bondar
Digital scholarship for keeps: what matters and what lasts?
We who have attained positions in the humanities in higher education at any level must recognize that the opportunities for success and stability in academic careers have been dwindling rapidly. Perhaps we take a stance of resistance to insist that standards of evaluation for merit and promotion must remain stable in the face of pressures to our institutions, but this does not protect our programs, our university presses, our colleagues from dwindling enrollments and positions. While the safety of our programs is by no means secure, we would do well to support experimental work of collaboration across disciplines and ranks, as well as creative scholarship developing alternative media to the traditional domains of academic publishing—the projects of the digital and public humanities. Too much labor in building digital community, projects, and courses goes unacknowledged in our merit and promotion practices to the point of alienating scholars who should be poised to take our disciplines in new directions. Revising evaluation standards within our institutions everywhere may be critical to preserving humanities programs. Supporting and encouraging digital scholarship may also help us to recognize what matters and what lasts in a time marked by digital innovation and evanescence.
