Hacking as Scholarship

FatherBusa writes "I am a professor of English who specializes in what is usually called "humanities computing"--a discipline concerned with creating and theorizing about the use of computers in humanities research (the homepage for the Association for Computers in the Humanities has some info). I was recently asked to join a working group charged with the task of establishing a peer review process for scholarly software projects in the humanities and stumbled across the Guidelines for Evaluating Work with Digital Media in the Modern Languages put out by the Modern Language Association (the main professional organization for language and literature studies in North America). Hackers working in humanities departments may want to give it a read. It's an interesting statement that speaks to the (sometimes difficult) process of getting "tools" and other sorts of digital work evaluated as academic scholarship in promotion and tenure processes."

Comments

Bow before Father Busa, tadpoles!

[Creosote]

People, you are demonstrating a pitiful lack of awareness about your own history. Father Busa has been coding since your grandparents were in diapers. If you've used the online Oxford English Dictionary or any other dictionary or concordance software, you owe what you're doing at least in part to Father Busa's interest in text processing 50 years ago. For that matter, if you use XML, since much of the work in SGML/XML and the theory of markup languages has been done by people coming out of humanities computing.

Repeat in chorus with me: We are not worthy...

Professor with Mixed Feelings About This

[Walker]

I have sat on committees at my university talking about this very subject. I teach math and CS, so they bring me in for the "technical perspective" (whatever that means). The debates have been very heated.

In some cases I support this. Scholarship is a very broad concept at small liberal arts colleges (unlike tier one research schools). If you write a textbook that has no new ideas of your own, but which can help students learn the material better, that counts as scholarship. If that is acceptable, then why shouldn't some computer tool that you created (i.e. language teaching tool, a chip simulator for a C.S. class, etc...) count?

In my opinion, it should, provided that it goes through the same rigid requirements other stuff does. It is not enough to write a textbook and force your students to use it -- you must demonstrate that it is good enough that other people use it as well (otherwise you are just pawning crap off on your students). That is the difference between scholarship and class preparation.

And this is also where the debate gets nasty. Many (but not all!) of the people who are trying to get credit for their hacking as scholarship are trying to get it with just their class prep and not subjecting it to higher standards. Sure, they want a review process, but the people often reviewing are other people who want credit for hacking, not the academic community at large. This is very bad; I am reminded of a card from the game "Survival of the Witless" (a satire of tenure politics) called "New York Times reviews of each others books".

As a result many of them have hurt their credibility badly. And therefore, even though I would like to support them, it has been very difficult.