Peer Reviewing Digital Archives: the NINES model

The aim of this workshop is to invite digital
humanists to work together in figuring out how
to peer review digital scholarship. It springs
from three impulses. The first has to do with
the day-to-day work of NINES. Dana Wheeles
is Project Manager and Laura Mandell Associate
Director of NINES, the Networked Infrastructure for
Nineteenth-century Electronic Scholarship (http://
www.nines.org). Dana and Laura are engaged in
helping scholars figure out how to create state-ofthe-art scholarly editions, on a much smaller scale
than King’s Centre for Computing in the Humanities.
We would like to help people who have projects
in early-to-mid stages of development learn about
standards and best practices for their digital archives,
editions, or artworks. Second, Dana Wheeles
works with sites to develop a robust metadata
system that makes possible their interoperability
in the NINES universe. She will discuss metadata
encoded in NINES RDF and demonstrate its
practical values. Third, as Chair of the MLA
Committee on Information Technology this year,
Laura Mandell participated in an excellent workshop
for department chairs and junior faculty, created
by Susan Schreibman, about reviewing digital work
for promotion and tenure. Organizations such as
NINES can help junior scholars obtain the rewards
they deserve for digital work through thoughtful peer
review and documentation. We invite members of
Promotion and Tenure committees as well as heads
of humanities organizations to attend this workshop.
- 1st Part: Laura Mandell will present the MLA
standards for Electronic scholarly editions as well
as information from the Electronic Literature
Organization. Best practices for sustainability
culled from articles in the library sciences will
also be presented, and then participants will
spend some time working together looking at real
projects in order to figure out how to implement
this information practically. We will sketch out for
each site examined workflow and interface design.
- 2nd Part: Dana Wheeles will demonstrate how
to create the metadata needed for inclusion in
NINES. Though participants may be planning
to submit their work to NINES, they need not
be working in nineteenth-century studies for
this demonstration to be valuable. For those
who are developing sites or archives, learning
what metadata is needed at early stages of
development is a boon, and for those who
wish to sponsor an organization like NINES,
or incorporate NINES practices into an existing
organization, our metadata and indexing systems
provide an interesting model.
- 3rd Part: Finally, for the last third of the workshop,
workshop leaders and participants will all work
together in peer-reviewing digital archives and
sites. In the process, we will sketch out the
kinds of documentation needed for selecting and
encouraging the best digital work as well as for
creating in the space of interdisciplinary digital
humanities a robust set of practices for supporting
the professional development of the scholars who
contribute. The draft we write at this workshop
will go forward to be worked on during the NINES
Summer Institute, 2011.
This workshop is directed at two audiences:
producers of electronic scholarship and art, on the
one hand, and arbiters of it, on the other. The
latter are those who are actively engaged in creating
and reforming the institutional structures in which
these projects will live and thrive. They might be
editors of journals, managers of specific institutional
structures, directors of disciplinary organizations,
librarians, bibliographers, chairs of departments, or
interested collaborators.
Half day workshop: Afternoon, 6 July.