This post was first published at ideasunderground.com on 24 May, 2009. I’ve reproduced it here partly because that blog no longer exists, partly because it’s a lazy-but-efficient way of offering an idea I’ve been mulling over for some time to a new audience, and partly because I’m (sadly, perhaps) still quite taken with it. It fits well with my belief that scholars – especially in a post Edward Snowden world – need to understand the engineered nature of the virtualmachines they use in their work (regardless of whether they want to build digital outputs or not). Achieving a robust level of scholarly self-consciousness in the digital age is a challenge that most people have (I suggest) given up on, in the face of technological advance rather than methodological choice or epistemological orientation. This has huge implications for the integrity of future scholarship, but opens up equally fascinating areas for research and analysis.

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I’ve been thinking about the now relatively long-standing debate in Digital Humanities about ‘who’s in and who’s out’ and wondering if there’s an angle we haven’t been considering (by writing ‘we’ this makes an assumption I’m ‘in’, of course, which I have to admit feels both presumptive given there’s a chance I don’t fit someone else’s criteria and odd given I’m a Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities). My suggestion is that we need to stop only thinking about the specific technical skills a digital humanist needs, and consider the function the (extra)discipline plays in the broader community, as well as the role(s) it is likely to need to play in the future.

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I’ve put off writing this post for a long time, and I’m still not sure about publishing it because I need to keep thinking it through and catching up on some reading on the topic. Perhaps I should also note that readers from New Zealand, Australia, and other ex-commonwealth nations (as well as Britain) might find it bemusing. The backstory is that I’m writing to a North American audience on a topic specific to the digital humanities. Here goes.

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This is the text of a talk given at eResearch 2013, University of Canterbury, New Zealand, July 03, 2013.

I can only offer a very formative overview of this subject here, but I’m keen to at least put it on the radar. As everyone knows, vast amounts of our cultural heritage are either being digitized and put online or being born online, and this has significant implications for the arts and humanities. In particular, it forces us to start increasing our understanding of, and capability with, the engineered technologies that deliver resources to us online. It will always be difficult getting the balance right – we’re never going to be engineers – but we need to start working through the issues.

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This post was republished as ‘Evaluating Scholarly Digital Outputs: The 6 Layers Approach’, Journal of Digital Humanities, 1:1, Fall, 2012.

The topic of appropriate standards for the evaluation of scholarly digital outputs has come up in conversation at my institution (the University of Canterbury, New Zealand) recently and I’ve realised I haven’t got a ready or simple answer, usually replying that such standards are extremely important because we need to ensure scholarly digital outputs attain to the same standards as, say, monographs, but that they’re evolving. The conversations normally don’t go much further than that. This post, then, is an attempt to get my thoughts down on paper so I can point colleagues to a handy url summarising my thoughts. Much of it will merely repeat common knowledge for digital humanists, but might be of interest.

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