Fostering Change: Evaluating Digital Scholarship for Professional Credit

As the field of digital humanities becomes an ever more important facet of both research and teaching, we need to find means for ensuring that the work is properly evaluated and that credit is given to the scholars who engage in it. The problems associated with developing this are complex, and new modes of research and publication have proven difficult to incorporate into disciplines that have traditionally put high value on print. Scholarly societies have an important role to play in encouraging creative thought and action about how best to accommodate these new modes within our disciplines

Speaking relatively: a history of incest and the family in eighteenth-century England

Incest was not prohibited in eighteenth-century English society, or so the examination of statute law would lead one to think. This was not due to a lack of interest. In literary texts as varied as Moll Flanders, Horace Walpole's The Mysterious Mother and Henry Neville's The Isle of Pines, incest played crucial roles. Nevertheless, historians have either overlooked its significance its significance, or have assumed the universality of its prohibition. In fact, the eighteenth century had no concept of universal taboo, and the law did not specifically prohibit sexual relations within the nuclear family. All of these factors: the lack of an idea of universal taboo, the complexity of the law, and its importance in literature are focuses of this thesis. This investigation of a hidden phenomenon has utilised a wide range of texts: imaginative productions; church and temporal court records; newspaper accounts; biblical commentary; and legal tracts. Unlike socially oriented studies of the family, all of these sources are read as produced texts in which incest provides a unique lens for viewing attitudes towards relationships between individual and collective identities. The mother who slept with her son, the father who raped his daughter, the brother and sister overcome by desire all contributed to the contemporary understanding of family life. The ability of incest to reveal underlying fault lines in ideas about authority, sexual relations and kinship ties makes it a promising topic. The exploration of legal conceptions of incest examines contemporary prohibitions and their origin in biblical law. Intertwined with the legal discourse on the family were conceptions of natural law. The operation of the church law in the consistory courts and the temporal law in London's Old Bailey provides insight into the relationship between legal understandings and social practice

TEI and Project Bamboo

Project Bamboo, a cyberinfrastructure initiative supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, takes as its core mission the enhancement of arts and humanities research through the development of shared technology services. Rather than developing new tools for curating or analyzing data, Project Bamboo aims to provide core infrastructure services including identity and access management, collection interoperability, and scholarly data management. The longer-term goal is for many organizations and projects to leverage those services so as to direct their own resources towards innovative tool or collection development. In addition, Bamboo seeks to model a paradigm for tool integration that focuses on tools as discrete services (such as a morphology annotation service and a geoparser service, instead of a web-based environment that does morphological annotation and geoparsing) that can be applied to texts, individually or in combination with other services, to enable complex curatorial and analytical workflows. This paper addresses points of intersection between Project Bamboo and TEI over the course of Bamboo's development, including the role of TEI in Bamboo's ongoing development work. The paper highlights the significant contributions of the TEI community to the early development of the project through active participation in the Bamboo Planning Project. The paper also addresses the influence of TEI on the Bamboo Technology Project's collection interoperability and corpus curation/analysis initiatives, as well as its role in current (as of October 2012) development work

Report from the “What is Open?” Workgroup

The scholarly community’s current definition of “open” captures only some of the attributes of openness that exist across different publishing models and content types. Open is not an end in itself, but a means for achieving the most effective dissemination of scholarship and research. We suggest that the different attributes of open exist along a broad spectrum and propose an alternative way of describing and evaluating openness based on four attributes: discoverable, accessible, reusable, and transparent. These four attributes of openness, taken together, form the draft “DART Framework for Open Access.” This framework can be applied to both research artifacts as well as research processes. We welcome input from the broader scholarly community about this framework

Speaking relatively A history of incest and the family in eighteenth-century England

Available from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:DXN054680 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreSIGLEGBUnited Kingdo