I. Relevance of Topical Sessions to History

A. A New Medium

The discussion began with the idea that the computer is a medium in a different way for us than it is for performing arts. How do we use the medium, how do we exploit it? If we take it for a different meaning, as a medium for connecting us with materials. What possibilities are there for mediation with our materials.

Relevance for history has to include question of which function. It is a medium of value (without a doubt) for getting to our audience, for teaching and outreach. But the committee was particularly concerned with the question of what can it do for the historian as researcher. Does this device allow the scholar to do scholarship in a way he or she couldn't do otherwise? (This question has been at the core of the field committee's concerns for both day 1 and 2.)

B. The Quantitative Dimension

One important way to think about this is to look at the quantitative dimension. Some of the projects we saw are stunning and they make a large amount of material available. This clearly does something that wasn't done before. More evidence can be gathered and analyzed than ever before. This is not simply a question of quantity, but also of expanding breadth of material. Allows different views of history, and a reach to broader audience. But the question remains, "Does this change the way we do history?"

Most of the members of the committee were deeply concerned that to date little new scholarship had been done using the new media. To date most efforts were focused on building online archives and databases and that research agenda had not caught up.

C. Murray's Categories of Humanities Computing: Encyclopedic, Spatial, Procedural, and Participatory

It was suggested that we consider Janet Murray's categorization of humanities computing as composed of four characteristics: encyclopedic, spatial, procedural, and participatory and that history might be uniquely situated in the humanities to take advantage of all four.

Without a doubt until now, our largest projects, the ones best known have been primarily encyclopedic. It was suggested that this encyclopedic characteristic makes a qualitative difference as they allow scholars to see history differently

II. Encyclopedic Projects

Discussion bore in on the nature of encyclopedic projects. In particular how they would deal with the availability of additional relevant material from other sources, for example, the New York Times going online. One choice is to try to suck new raw material into an original project and mark it up as other material in the project is marked up. This has the great advantage that it takes full advantage of new material. However, it is expensive and limiting. There was the clear sense that as new material came available, we need new tools to be able to query and make use of them in relationship to our existing projects. We also discussed the value of allowing users to correct and add to databases, to make the process of building these encyclopedia projects participatory and collaborative.

III. Technical Issues

At this point, we discussed more technical issues, esp. advances in OCR software and its continued inability to recognize handwriting. We also discussed limitations of visual identification software. There are no programs to search images usefully, only metadata associated with them. We also discussed improvements in search engines, esp. links-based engines like google. There was a range of opinions on the value of portal pages, linking to “valuable” sites in a particular field.

IV. Reviewing and Evaluating Digital Scholarship

We then had an extended discussion on reviewing and evaluating digital scholarship. There was general agreement that we don't have clear agreement, no less guidelines, on how to evaluate web sites. Types of sites vary greatly (and overlap). Even more troubling, sites change constantly, with no clearly identified versions. Reviewing an ongoing project is very different than reviewing a published work. How can one review these?

The Journal of American History is to publish suggested guidelines soon, H-Net is to start a web site award program. Nonetheless, we have a long way to go to figure out how to evaluate sites. We had general agreement that this was a central issue. Reviewing and evaluating work is essential to professional rewards and progress of profession. Must figure out way to apply this central professional function to the web.

V. The Central Issue: What is Digital Scholarship?

Discussion returned to the central issue where we began. What is digital scholarship? How can new media be used to do more than accumulate evidence and illustrate scholarship. There was a rather pointed exchange over whether one type of scholarship was being privileged over others, but at core there was general agreement of the need to encourage the publication of the type of new research, both narrative and analytical, using the new media.

Encyclopedic projects were valuable, but not sufficient. Most felt that the new media had potential to be used in research publication in creative ways that advanced arguments and provided new insights. This remains a major challenge for the profession and the AHR is eager to publish strong analytical articles that use the new media.

Discussion took a historical turn as we considered the origins of the printed article. Printed articles grew out of disputation where the audience was counted on to participate. When we went to printed word, what transformation of discourse took place. Now we might be back to place where we can restore dynamic nature.

We discussed six different features of a dynamic article:

1. Elaborate documentation

2. Continual commentary (living footnotes)

3. Demonstration of something (data set)

4. Elaboration of process of thought

5. Participation of audience

6. Complexity (multi-directional arguments) (Hypertext)

VI. Role of Scholarly Societies? Develop Guidelines

We finished with comments that the scholarly societies need to develop (and promulgate) guidelines to reward variety of types of scholarship (including teaching and outreach) in which historians engage.

yle