Anvil Academic aims to provide platform for digital scholarship | Inside Higher Ed

“Academics who specialize in using technology to conduct and enable new kinds of humanities research are in high demand. At the same time, the current ecosystem of scholarly publishing can be inhospitable to their often-idiosyncratic research projects.   Two well-known organizations are teaming up with a handful of colleges and universities to try to change that by building a flexible platform where digital humanists could have their research published and certified that the work has passed through well-respected editorial gantlets. The platform, called Anvil Academic, is a joint project by the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education (NITLE) and the Council for Library and Information Resources (CLIR). Anvil aims to make it easier for digital humanists to publish nontraditional scholarly work under the auspices of traditional outlets, such as university presses. ‘Increasingly, research in the humanities is dependent on large data sets and involves sophisticated algorithms and visualizations in the execution of that research and in the construction of the products of scholarship,’ said Chuck Henry, the president of CLIR, in a statement. ‘Anvil will capture the environment in which this research is conducted: a linked ecology of scholarly expression, data, and tools of analysis that will over time become itself a place for new knowledge discovery.’ The idea is that visitors could log in to the Anvil online gateway — he says whether Anvil will be subscription-based or open-access is yet to be determined — and browse through various digital research ‘objects,’ such as searchable archives, game-based simulations and interactive maps of historical environments. Ideally, visitors will also be able to view the underlying data, media files and algorithms upon which the project is built, he says. These ingredients could be filed in a registry that other scholars could search and borrow from, Henry says. One of Anvil’s goals is to build a peer-review infrastructure for research that cannot be easily represented in text. While the digital humanities are widely considered an important frontier, tenure and promotion committees still have trouble evaluating the work of digital humanists because the format is often so unfamiliar...”