DHCommons is happy to announce the incorporation of all the project data that was contributed to the now-defunct arts-humanities.net site. By adding this data to the DHCommons project registry, the collection of projects available on DHCommons has grown by over 700, providing many new opportunities to explore previous work within digital humanities.
The project is a prosopographical study of the English convents in exile during the period 1600-1800 when it was illegal to be a nun in Britain. Key research questions include a broad response to the question 'Who were the nuns?' This involves locating the members in their family, religious, political and economic context and identifying the support networks sustaining the convents over two centuries.
Welcome to the first issue of DHCommons journal, a new kind of publication for digital humanities projects.
DHCommons attempts to meet a long-standing but growing need in the DH community for robust peer review of in progress—that is, beyond the planning stages‐but still developing projects. While building on precedents set by groups such as NINES or 18th Connect, DHCommons seeks to offer feedback earlier in projects’ lives, when new directions and development are still possible, but also to certify those projects’ early contributions to both the digital humanities and their disciplinary fields. We will review projects from centerNet's many regions and languages andwhenever possible in the project directors' preferred languages, so as to better reflect the scope and diversity of digital humanities work around the world. DHCommons complements the growing cadre of journals publishing digital humanities articles by providing a venue for full-project peer review. The project statements we will publish in each issue attempt to document both a project's contributions and its struggles, and the reviews we will publish alongside them outline projects' strengths, as well as areas for expansion or improvement. We hope these genres will provide scholars with valuable, transparent, and even practical access to the theories and methods of digital humanities work.
What does it mean to peer-review a digital humanities project? This is a question several groups have taken up in the past decades from different perspectives, but it has not yet been fully answered. Groups like NINES and 18thConnect did much early thinking about how to peer review large-scale digital projects, but their efforts benefited relatively narrow literary-historical subfields. More recently we have seen a growing number of of guidelines for evaluating digital scholarship in disciplines or more generally, for example:
Despite these efforts, however, the evaluation of digital projects continues to be a problem [Schreibman et al. 2011]. As Tanya Clement argues of the collection Switching Codes, digital projects often “[make]available a conversation that has very few listeners or readers in the humanities capable of appreciating the scholarship represented in this interdisciplinary work” [Clement 2012]. More broadly, we would argue, many DH projects struggle to find reviewers who can evaluate both their contributions to their humanities disciplines and the scholarship embedded in their methods or technical practices.
Additionally, given the growth of digital humanities programs, initiatives, and faculty positions in recent years, this “assessment gap” has real and ever more dire consequences. Digital humanities scholars are being hired, often at the junior level, in the expectation that they will lead ambitious digital research projects, which are often large-scale efforts that span disciplines, academic units, and substantial periods of time. However, there is little agreement about how such projects can be certified by the scholarly community; we largely do not know how to evaluate the very kinds of scholarship we increasingly wish to see produced in the digital humanities [Nowviskie 2011; Rockwell 2011]. This is a particularly crucial issue if we wish for work in the digital humanities to have relevance and significance within the field, but also beyond disciplinary boundaries.