Disclaimer: I have never formally reviewed a scholar’s work, nor has any of my work been formally reviewed. My views below are hypothetical and
What I know about the traditional peer review process is that it is usually 1. blind and anonymous, 2. terrifying, and 3. because of no. 1, there is a severe lack of accountability on the part of the reviewer, which can make the review run the gamut from useful to overly commented-on.
The process for reviewing traditional publications seems pretty straightforward and can probably be carried out anywhere one can read a manuscript or article draft. And sure, I’d believe that each academic press or publishing house has its own guidelines for review, but now that we have more and more digital projects being published on a variety of platforms, there should probably be some new guidelines for peer review.
The Journal of American History has posted some new guidelines and writes that most reviews will address the following five areas:
• Content
• Design
• Audience
• Digital Media
• Creators
Great! They’re thinking about the ways in which traditional scholarship reviews aren’t exactly analogous to digital history projects. You can find the Modern Language Association’s guidelines on appointment, promotion, tenure, and review regarding digital projects and interest here. The aspects of digital projects that are more applicable to this type of publication—and not traditional publications—is design and digital media. Content, Audience, and Creators are important, absolutely, to both types of review, although admittedly I find a lot of academic writing is not cognizant of audience. See Cameron Blevins’s post for more on the criteria, specifically audience.
But, returning to design and digital media, I think that these are the two components that actually set these projects apart. If one is going to undertake a digital project, there has to be good reasoning for using digital tools: not just because you’re a humanist and you can (see my post on Network Analysis and Topic Modeling). And, while there are those who would disagree, such a project has to LOOK nice, and I think that a reviewer absolutely has to take this into consideration. Being aesthetically pleasing, however, is hard considering the fluctuation of tools available to digital scholars.
Speaking of which, the JAH also makes a really important note: “One final way that digital history projects differ from books, exhibits, and films is that they are often works in progress.” This is something that resonates with me so deeply as I am constantly building, reshaping, and modifying my site and portfolio. Unlike an article, digital projects depend on the ever-shifting software platforms, and various code that is being updated. This is both positive, considering the great new advances, and negative, when thinking about the time of upkeep and updating.
I’ll close by saying that all scholarly works ought to be considered in their own context. I know that this is rarely the case, nor are such publications always reviewed by the proper people. If one is going to review a digital history project, it is essential to explore and “read” the project the way it was intended. If the proper technology is not available—get it! Tell the publishers or project managers and find a way to discover the project, and how it was designed.
As Todd Presner asks in The Journal of Digital Humanities: “Is a digital research project ‘equivalent’ to a book published by a university press, an edited volume, a research article, or something else?” Well, no, which is why they need to be considered in their own way. You wouldn’t assess a tax attorney’s ability to interpret Plato’s Πολιτεία, would you?
