Peer Review in the Age

of Digital Humanities

Roopika Risam

Salem State University

Twitter: @roopikarisam

Peer Review in Print

Double-blind peer review remains the gold

standard for validating scholarly work

Value accrued by scholarship has traditionally

flowed mono-directionally from peer review

Primacy of print-based peer review practices

are reinforced by hierarchies governing

academic hiring and tenure and promotion

Peer Review’s Digital Problem

Conventions governing the gatekeeping of

“scholarly” work are increasingly mismatched

to the digital milieu

Digital scholarship requires both

consideration of factors that distinguish it

from print scholarship and a new approach to

vetting digital work

Beyond Formats

Digital scholarship raises questions of

medium or platform

Digital academe raises questions of

epistemology

Digital scholarship is not simply print

scholarship gone digital but redefines genre

and gives rise to its own conventions

The Luddites Speak

E-journals marked an early foray into digital

platforms for academic work

Online journals raise concerns that recourse

to the digital decreases scholarly merit, even

when the journals have review boards

Many e-journals reproduce the hierarchies

and values of print knowledge, relying on

traditional notions of what academic work

looks like

Affordances of the Digital

Scholarly publishing has responded with

greater interest in open access

Digital platforms have made the creation of

new journals possible

Journals often use digital platforms to

distribute articles ahead of the publication

lags that accompany born-print journals

Digital Differences

Digital scholarship is often collaborative,

rarely finished, and frequently public

These qualities render digital work not readily

legible to hiring or tenure and promotion

committees

Consideration of these differences is central

to scholarship in the 21st century

Digital Collaborations

Digital scholarship is often collaborative

Creation and distribution of print knowledge in

the humanities is usually solitary

Collaborative work allows scholars to

combine skills, perspectives, labor, and time

Pitfall: Evaluating individual contributions in

hiring or tenure and promotion is difficult

Digital Ends

Digital scholarship is rarely finished

Digital projects may exist in phases or be

perpetually in progress

There is often no single event comparable to

submitting a manuscript for review

Pitfall: Digital projects require new

approaches to linear conventions of scholarly

time

Digital Publics

Digital scholarship is frequently public

Scholarship in the humanities traditionally relies on private labor

Public components of print scholarship are encoded in rituals: talks, symposia, panels

Pitfall: Differences of privacy and publicness for print and digital scholarship cleave to status and prestige

Radical Digitality

Digital scholarship threatens to displace a

benign academic who does not trouble the

value and status of print knowledge

The digital scholar is a radical actor, part of a

growing trend in academic discourse that

requires rethinking of the production of

academic value

Making the Digital Legible

Tracking citations, grants, and usage

statistics

DHCommons

Anvil Academic

Redefining evaluation

Attending to particulars of the digital as

affordances