I visited the poster session at Saturday and found a really interesting project, which is ‘already failed’. It is a project initiated by Middlebury College. They are willing to standardize the evaluating process in digital humanity.
In traditional academic research field, scholars present their work by writing research papers. An effective evaluation is to do a peer-review. Peer-review is a prerequisite of publishing a paper in an authority press. However, in digital humanity, we don’t have an authorized peer-review process that can testify a DH-project.
‘Forging New Traditions’ tried to make a standard in digital humanity to do a peer-review. They failed at last but their effort, fortunately, reveals some problems and potentials in digital humanity field. Traditionally, people need a peer-review process because they want to publish their papers on a press. In digital humanity, there is no press like ‘Science’ or ‘Lancet’ working as an authority. The team in Middlebury also tried to cooperate with some traditional presses. However, to publish a digital project in a traditional press is obviously a bad idea. Another obstacle is that the digital humanity is such a big combination. In other words, scholars express themselves in totally different forms. It is hard to standardize the process to evaluate them. For example, a GIS-research and a gephi social visualization are not comparable at all.The team in Middlebury tried to use matadata as an essencial tool to standardize the evaluation process. At last, they meet a completely failure.
However, their research reveals something. First, it reveals that in digital humanity, there is no authority. It is a good thing when we are publishing our digital humanity project but it is bad when we are trying to advertise it. Authority in one hand stands for restrain but in the other hand, it is a good source to communicate with other ‘verified scholar’. Second, it discovers an ultimate potential in digital humanity. We are not able to compare those project in one standard. Maybe in some day, digital humanity as a subject will become something like ‘Science’ or ‘Art’ rather than ‘Physics’ or ‘Chemistry’. Digital humanity contains a lot.
