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...