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Assessing Coauthored Contributions in DH

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Asked 5 years ago by Stéfan Sinclair
Latest answer from ethan.watrall
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Stéfan Sinclair
Admin
"5 authors on the paper? why, that's clearly a fifth of the work and worth only a fifth of a publication for your tenure case." There's a useful and growing set of documents about assessing digital scholarship in the humanities (see http://www.mla.org/resources/documents/rep_it/dig_eval for instance), but there's less discussion of how to assess co-authorship. Lone scholarship is so deeply entrenched in humanities culture that even the best arguments won't likely carry much weight until major, recognized organizations make statements about it. It's certainly been my experience that coauthored papers are rarely less work than single authored papers, and in many cases more work. Even if the words/author ratio is lower in some cases (depending on how the work was done), there's also a lot of coordination and refinement that needs to happen, not to mention (maybe even more importantly) the depth of the background work that made the article possible. Personally, I just enjoy co-authorship more and I think what's produced is better. Actually, all of my work is collaborative, so I don't really have much choice in the matter.

Anyway, a colleague asked me if I knew of any resources to point to for assessing co-authorship in the digital humanities, and I have nothing solid at hand. I'm hesitant to adopt outright models from other disciplines (e.g. computer science), because – at the risk of sounding exceptionalist – I think some aspects of digital humanities research are fairly unique.

Can anyone point to helpful guidelines for assessing co-authorship in the digital humanities?
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Posted 5 years ago Permalink
Bethany Nowviskie
Admin
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Hey, Stéfan -- Laura Mandell and Susan Schreibman are editing a cluster in the next issue of Profession on evaluating digital scholarship, and I will have a piece in it called, "Where Credit is Due: Preconditions for the Evaluation of Collaborative Digital Scholarship." It'll be about -- well, this kind of thing:

Fair evaluation of collaborative digital scholarship can only function within a complex network of responsibilities. Tenure committees are responsible for educating themselves about collaborative scholarly practices and the nature of digital humanities production, so that they may adequately counsel and fairly evaluate early-career scholars. Scholars who offer their work for evaluation are, in turn, responsible for making an honest assessment of their unique contributions and the relationship of those contributions to the intellectual labor of others. And digital humanities practitioners outside the ranks of the tenured and tenure-track faculty have a role to play in these conversations as well. Their own assertion (as professionals subject to alternate but equally consequential mechanisms of assessment) that credit be given where it is due can hasten the regularization of fair and productive evaluative practice among their academic faculty colleagues.

I found some useful statements by professional societies -- especially in the realm of public history (where notions of authorship and audience get blurred), and also took a look at the INKE project charter (PDF) as an example of the specific pre-negotiation of resource sharing and attribution of credit. Concerns like this also drove our conversations at the recent NEH-funded "Off the Tracks" meeting -- where we cooked up a "Collaborators' Bill of Rights." You probably also know Lisa Spiro's blog posts on collaboration in DH and collaborative authorship in the humanities, and Kathleen Fitzpatrick on "rethinking originality" in what she calls the "digital future of authorship" (also a PDF).

I found it interesting and revelatory that professional societies in the humanities often make plainer statements about giving credit where it's due in the context of plagiarism than in imagining healthy collaboration.

I'm happy to share a draft of the Profession article. I believe it won't come out until next year. Drop me a line!

And here are just some other things I responded to:

Ede, Lisa and Andrea A. Lunsford. “Collaboration and Concepts of Authorship.” PMLA, Vol. 116, No. 2 (2001): 354-369.

Harris, Joseph. “Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss: Class Consciousness in Composition.” College Composition and Communication 52 (2000): 43-68.

Kent, Phillip G. and Jenny Ellis. “The emerging role of Scholar-Practitioner: Response to the draft ‘Work Focus Categorisation Policy.’” University of Melbourne Library. 28 January 2011. (PDF)

Purdy, James P. and Joyce R. Walker. “Valuing Digital Scholarship: Exploring the Changing Realities of Intellectual Work.” Profession (2010): 177-195.

Posted 5 years ago Permalink
jbj
Administrator

In a recent meeting of like-minded souls in New Haven, it took about 90 minutes before conversation turned toward tenure.

It seems to me that the real pain point with departmental tenure committees sometimes is less their ability to evaluate the work of the junior scholar--though that problem exists--than with their ability to make the case for that work to university-wide committees, who aren't familiar with changes in a discipline and who are very accustomed to seeing a specific kind of work from a department.

Which just underlines even more the need for that self-education of departmental tenure committees: They need to be able to represent the work accurately to an audience that is even less used to the DH than themselves.

(And, Bethany, I'd love to see a draft.)

Posted 5 years ago Permalink
Brett Bobley
Member

I remember this discussion coming up at an SCI meeting a couple of years ago. Willeke Wendrich, an archeologist from UCLA, pointed out that in her humanities field almost all the work was collaborative. So I wonder if it might be worth investigating how departments assess co-authored work in archeology (which is often strongly digital these days) and how those lessons might be applied to other fields?

I did a quick search on the website of the American Anthropological Association and found an interesting section on the site titled Tenure and Promotion Recommendations for Applied Anthropology Programs. See: http://aaanet.org/resources/departments/

Here's a short quote from one of their reports:

"...under traditional tenure and promotion guidelines, single-author articles are afforded more weight than multipleauthor ones. However, the realities of applied work in which anthropologists work closely with multi-disciplinary teams and with community-based practitioners, often require –logistically and ethically- the inclusion of multiple parties in the dissemination of results. The narrative should clearly state the “deliverables” of applied work."

Sounds familiar!

I didn't dig too deeply here, but perhaps Anthropology/Archeology might be a good place to look for some existing guidance that would make a useful model for DH.

Posted 5 years ago Permalink
Stéfan Sinclair
Admin

@jbj my experience has been the difficulty in avoiding the trap of simplistic metrics: a 1-1 author/article ratio is easy, as is a straight work/authors calculation. Beyond that we're in ad-hoc and nuance land, which can be scary territory indeed, and it's no wonder that committees seek to avoid it.

Truth be told, I'm not even sure I'd feel comfortable with saying that all co-authored articles are always worth a full article for each author (though that would be more generally accurate I think than a straight work/authors division). Every case would need to be assessed individually. I know I have to state my contribution to a co-authored article in my annual review, but that's misleading, since what I really want to express is the total value of the article (an argument that the article itself is worth more because it's beyond what I could have done individually. For instance (don't dwell on the details, on the principle), a three person article isn't 1article/3authors but something like 2articles/3authors. Messy and subjective, but assessing a dossier should be worth it.

As you say, there's a shared onus.

Posted 5 years ago Permalink
ethan.watrall
Member

Replying to @Brett Bobley's post:

While I would generally agree with this, its important to note that w/in anthropology, there are different opinions as to the "weight" of collaborative work. These opinions almost always break down along sub-disciplinary lines. There is less of a recognition of collaborative work among socio-cultural anthropology. This has a lot to do with the fact that socio-cultural has more of a "lone scholar" tradition. On the other hand, archaeologists are generally more tolerant and accepting of collaborative work. This has to do with the fact that the nature and process of archeological research is deeply collaborative and interdisciplinary.

Posted 5 years ago Permalink

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