Violins in the Subway: Scarcity Correlations, Evaluative Cultures, and Disciplinary Authority in the Digital Humanities

Despite the proliferation of digital humanities projects, varying greatly in form and media, there remain anxieties about the evaluation of digital work. Digital humanists find, time and time again, that they are expected to perform twice the labour of traditional scholars; once for the work itself and once again for its evaluation. At the same time, traditional humanists often experience a sensation of threat from the digital arena, believing that it is easy to gain employment, grants, and tenure if one is a digital humanist. In this chapter, I ask how we can understand a double logic in which digital-humanities work is at once so powerful as to crowd out the traditional humanists while at the same time so poorly understood as to need supplementation by traditional publication. Classifying the existing mechanisms of evaluation into a three-fold typology of 1.) a desired scarcity correlation; 2.) a set of media-specific denoting frames; and 3.) a set of disciplinary understandings, I show how and why DH remains radical in its work yet traditional in its outputs

Symbolic capital and scholarly communication in the humanities: An analysis of sociotechnical transition

This dissertation offers a conceptual study of academic publishing, especially for the Humanities, in the context of the current transition from print to digital text. It centralizes the crucial service that publishers offer to authors in formal scholarly communication, namely that of bestowing symbolic capital (or: esteem, prestige, renown) to scholars. On the premise that disciplinary communities shape research and communication practices, chapter 1 extends the employment of accepted methods from the sociology of science to analyse the epistemological and social characteristics of scholarly communities in the Humanities. These characteristics shape disciplinary research and publication practices, which are implicitly understood by insiders but seldomly articulated. Chapter 2 explicates these habitual practices of scholarly authors and publishers and addresses the value of their interactions. Its analysis is rooted in Bourdieusian field theory, albeit with significant extensions, for instance on the mechanisms with which symbolic capital may be transferred. Precisely this esteem-bestowing function of scholarly publishing has been established over the course of the twentieth century and remains vital, despite the recent rise of online scholarly communication networks and content delivery platforms by other parties than publishers; this is the line of argument in chapters 3 and 4. The coda suggests further merit of this conceptual framework in exploring current issues in scholarly publishing at large.Modern and Contemporary Studie

Academic publication overload

Modern and Contemporary Studie

Exploring the Navigation Tools: A Sociocultural Perspective on Online Search Technologies

Modern and Contemporary Studie