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
Our students can't / don't want to read and think they never have to write again.
Our administrators don't remember what they learned in humanities courses.
Corporate and political control of our institutions devalues what we care about.
AI is changing our thought processes and workflows.
Limited university support for digital project hosting
Background image: Flickr from Bureau of Land Management: New Carissa shipwreck
Background image source: Mission Lifeline Search and Rescue
See People, Practice, Power: Digital Humanities Outside the Center, eds. Anne B. McGrail, Angel David Nieves, and Siobhan Senier (2022).
Roopika Risam, “Stewarding Place: Digital Humanities at the Regional Comprehensive University." In People, Practice, Power, Digital Humanities Outside the Center, eds. Anne B. McGrail, Angel David Nieves, and Siobhan Senier (2022).
[...] we have reframed the limitations of a regional comprehensive university—student profile, unique untapped resources, and emphasis on student success—as affordances for our local approach to digital humanities. We approach design from this perspective, recognizing that there would not be need for digital humanities at the university if not for its value to our students. There is simply not enough time or money available to invest in projects based on faculty research alone, and digital humanities experiences are especially valuable to our students.
—Roopika Risam, about Salem State U.
Who defines the "impact" of humanities scholarship?
See HumetricsHSS: Humane Metrics Initiative
"Current incentives and rewards create an unsustainable and unstable scholarly ecosystem."
"Making change requires understanding the levers you control within your institution and outside of it; recognizing your own agency and the spaces in which you have influence."
"Values work is iterative, ongoing, and moves at the speed of trust."
Image credit: Lorenzo Petrantoni, in "Research evaluation: Impact." Nature 502, 287 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/502287a
"Bring out number, weight, & measure in a year of dearth"
—William Blake, The Proverbs of Hell
Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reuse of digital assets
Examples/suggestions inspired by the digital and public humanities
Image source: Pinterest. Inspiration, Blade Runner (1982, director's cut)
Schools, departments, programs, you can:
Andrew Pilsch and Shawna Ross, "Labor, alienation, and the digital humanities," The Bloomsbury handbook to the digital humanities, Bloomsbury Handbooks: 2022, https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:50071/ .