Does Digital Scholarship Have a Future? (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE.edu

" ...Even the academy, traditionally skeptical of externally generated change, has become blasé about web-induced transformation. Everyone assumes everyone else is on e-mail, is adept with digital library resources, and is electronically connected to professional organizations. Professors fire up Firefox or Skype or Google Earth in class without thinking about using 'technology.' These are big changes in higher education, and they have come quickly. Yet the foundation of academic life—the scholarship on which everything else is built—remains surprisingly unaltered. The articles and books that scholars produce today bear little mark of the digital age in which they are created. Researchers routinely use electronic tools in their professional lives but not to transform the substance or form of their scholarship. Alan Gross and Joseph Harmon, in a comprehensive overview of digital innovation in the academy, identify exciting projects that have emerged over the last two decades, but they conclude: 'Mainstream publication has yet to be seriously affected.' 1 Not many scholars worry about this situation. A recent random sample by Ithaka S+R finds that two-thirds of faculty—across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities—judge that new digital methods are 'not valuable or important' for their research. The study notes that even though 'digital practices may influence these scholars' work in a variety of ways,' few scholars see 'the value of integrating digital practices into their work as a deliberate activity.' Many scholars judge that using digital methods would simply 'not be worth the time'; about one-third of the respondents said they do not know 'how to effectively integrate digital research activities and methodologies' into their work and have no desire to learn.2 For those of us who have watched the story of academic digital innovation unfold, this is a bit puzzling and disappointing. In the early 1990s, when the web was an entirely new thing, untested and boundless, the digital world appeared to be a place where scholars might want and need to create something new for themselves. Despite the restrictions imposed by slow modems, weak processors, and limited servers, the web's first decade saw ambitious efforts to build new scholarly tools, including the Perseus Project in the Classics, the Rossetti Archive and the Walt Whitman Archive in literature, and the Valley of the Shadow in history. In 1999, looking forward to the new century, Robert Darnton reimagined the monograph as a richly layered pyramid of analysis and documentation, of theory and pedagogy, of review and response.3 During this same time, the Modern Language Association and the American Historical Association encouraged their disciplines to innovate, the Library of Congress and important research libraries fostered ambitious digitization efforts such as American Memory and Chronicling America, the American Council of Learned Societies fostered digital monographs, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities encouraged bold experimentation and the creation of sustainable infrastructure. The pace of capacity-building continues today. Projects such as the Digital Public Library of America and HathiTrust foster exciting collaborations in building infrastructure and content. The concept of digital scholarship has emerged to describe this activity. Although the phrase sometimes refers to issues surrounding copyright and open access and sometimes to scholarship analyzing the online world, digital scholarship—emanating, perhaps, from digital humanities—most frequently describes discipline-based scholarship produced with digital tools and presented in digital form. The University of Richmond's Digital Scholarship Lab was established in 2007, and new centers have emerged at Rice, Brown, Emory, Miami, Ohio State, and Case Western Universities, the Universities of Utah, Oregon, Kansas, and California at Irvine, Haverford College, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, and other colleges and universities. The tag has been used also for recent conferences and initiatives at Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Duke, and Macalester, as well as in the United Kingdom. Though the recent popularity of the phrase digital scholarship reflects impressive interdisciplinary ambition and coherence, two crucial elements remain in short supply in the emerging field. First, the number of scholars willing to commit themselves and their careers to digital scholarship has not kept pace with institutional opportunities. Second, today few scholars are trying, as they did earlier in the web's history, to reimagine the form as well as the substance of scholarship. In some ways, scholarly innovation has been domesticated, with the very ubiquity of the web bringing a lowered sense of excitement, possibility, and urgency. These two deficiencies form a reinforcing cycle: the diminished sense of possibility weakens the incentive for scholars to take risks, and the unwillingness to take risks limits the impact and excitement generated by bold