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Item Disrupting Hierarchies of Evaluation: The Case of Reviews in Digital Humanities(Knowledge Futures, 2022-11-15) Risam, Roopika; Guiliano, Jen; History, School of Liberal ArtsThis essay discusses how the editors of the journal Reviews in Digital Humanities have developed a people-first approach to peer review: community-centered peer review policies, workflows, and practices intended to address the gap in evaluation of digital scholarship. This work offers a model for disrupting hierarchies of evaluation that position senior, tenured professors as the appropriate gatekeepers of “quality” for digital scholarship and instead reframes the notion of “scholarly community” to recognize that expertise lies beyond the professoriate — particularly when evaluating public-facing scholarship. The essay further offers an example of how to create a community-driven peer review culture that brings in graduate students, librarians, archivists, public humanities workers, curators, and more to assess scholarship. In doing so, it articulates a vision for disrupting conventional notions of “expertise” and, in turn, hierarchies of evaluation for scholarship within the academy. What does it mean to develop and implement a people-first peer review system? This question lies at the heart of our work founding and running Reviews in Digital Humanities, an open-access journal published on PubPub that is dedicated to peer reviewing digital scholarly outputs (e.g., digital archives, exhibits, data sets, games) based on humanities research. Reviews responds to a gap in evaluation at the intersection of technology and the humanities, offering researchers who produce scholarship in genres other than traditional monographs, journal articles, and book chapters the opportunity to seek the imprimatur of peer review and external vetting of their work. From our commitment to creating a humane system of peer review that supports scholars as people, to the design of our peer review workflow, to the selection of reviewers who participants, Reviews disrupts hierarchies of evaluation in the academy and aims to consistently remind our scholarly community that we are all people first. The journal emerged from conversations between us, based on our experiences running peer review mechanisms for digital humanities conferences together. Through this work, we recognized a lack of consensus over how to peer review digital scholarly outputs. Despite the fact that colleagues in digital humanities create digital scholarship, there appeared to be no shared sense of how to evaluate digital scholarship created by others. Although professional organizations like the Modern Language Association (MLA) and American Historical Association (AHA) have invested time in developing guidelines, these have yet to be operationalized in evaluation. In addition to the challenges of conference abstract reviewing, there has also been a lack of outlets for peer review of digital scholarly projects themselves. We further observed that those most negatively affected by this lack of consensus were scholars in areas such as African diaspora studies, Latinx studies, Native and Indigenous studies, Asian American studies, and other areas that have been systematically marginalized in the academy. As many in these fields are also often scholars of color and/or Indigenous scholars, the peer review problems for digital scholarship compound harm in multiple ways: scholars in these areas already have a burden of demonstrating the legitimacy of their research, which is further compounded by the lack of an evaluation structure for the digital scholarship they create. This, in turn, has impacts on how their work is (or isn’t) valued in hiring, reappointment, tenure, and promotion. Recognizing that the many facets of these scholars’ identities as people has a direct impact on their professional lives, we identified the lack of peer review as a clear deterrent to building up digital scholarship in these underrepresented fields in digital humanities.Item Frederick Douglass’s “New Departure” in the Reconstruction Era Woman Suffrage Movement(IUPUI Institute for American Thought, 2022-12-19) McKivigan, John R.; Schwartz, Alex; History, School of Liberal ArtsItem The Frederick Douglass Papers Speaks Out: The Frederick Douglass Papers Speaks Out(ADE, 2022-04-11) McKivigan, John R.; Schwartz, Alex; History, School of Liberal ArtsItem Digital Humanities Workshops: Lessons Learned(Routledge, 2023) Estill, Laura; Guiliano, Jennifer; History, School of Liberal ArtsDigital Humanities Workshops: Lessons Learned is the first volume to focus explicitly on the most common and accessible kind of training in digital humanities (DH): workshops. Drawing together the experiences and expertise of dozens of scholars and practitioners from a variety of disciplines and geographical contexts, the chapters in this collection examine the development, deployment, and assessment of a workshop or workshop series. In the first section, “Where?”, the authors seek to situate digital humanities workshops within local, regional, and national contexts. The second section, “Who?”, guides readers through questions of audience in relation to digital humanities workshops. In the third and final section, “How?”, authors explore the mechanics of such workshops. Taken together, the chapters in this volume answer the important question: why are digital humanities workshops so important and what is their present and future role? Digital Humanities Workshops: Lessons Learned examines a range of digital humanities workshops and highlights audiences, resources, and impact. This volume will appeal to academics, researchers, and postgraduate students, as well as professionals working in the DH field.Item Introduction to the Special Forum, “Approaches to Science, Technology, and Environment in Chinese History.”(BRILL, 2023-01-26) Zhang, Xin; History, School of Liberal ArtsItem Discovering Chinese Science and Technology: A Critical Review(BRILL, 2023-01-26) Zhang, Xin; History, School of Liberal ArtsFor most of the twentieth century, the investigation into the development of science and technology in China has been based on the assumption that China lacked the conditions to achieve that on its own before it was exposed to Western knowledge. The same assumption has led many inquiries into the search for shortcomings in Chinese civilization or the failure to embrace Western knowledge. It was only near the very end of the twentieth century that a breakthrough finally arrived to allow scholars to free themselves from the assumption. This article traces the history of the field as it evolved through nearly a century from denying China’s own identity to finally recognizing it. I aim to show, one of the main reasons many researchers had held this rather Western-centric view for nearly a century was to the influence of the “rise of the West” historical narrative, which dominated the discourse on world history. Only after the narrative was seriously questioned did we begin to witness significant changes in the field toward realizing China’s own achievements and historical trajectory in the development of science and technology.Item The Unessay as Native-Centered History and Pedagogy(Ball State University Libraries, 2022) Guiliano, Jennifer; History, School of Liberal ArtsThe Unessay as Native-Centered History and Pedagogy explores how the unessay functions with an Introduction to Native History course that centers Native lived experiences and voices.Item Neither Computer Science, nor Information Studies, nor Humanities Enough: What Is the Status of a Digital Humanities Conference Paper?(Open Library of Humanities, 2022) Estill, Laura; Guiliano, Jennifer; History, School of Liberal ArtsThis paper explores the disciplinary and regional conventions that surround the status of conference papers throughout their lifecycle from submission/abstract, review, presentation, and in some cases, publication. Focusing on national and international Digital Humanities conferences, while also acknowledging disciplinary conferences that inform Digital Humanities, this paper blends close readings of conference calls for papers with analysis of conference practices to reckon with what constitutes a conference submission and its status in relationship to disciplinary conventions, peer review, and publication outcomes. Ultimately, we argue that the best practice for Digital Humanities conferences is to be clear on the review and publication process so that participants can gauge how to accurately reflect their contributions.Item The circus we deserve? A front row look at the organization of the annual academic conference for the Digital Humanities(The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations, 2022) Estill, Laura; Guiliano, Jennifer; Ortega, Élika; Terras, Melissa; Verhoeven, Deb; Layne-Worthey, Glen; History, School of Liberal ArtsAcademic conferences are considered central to the dissemination of research and play a key role in the prestige systems of academia. And yet the organization of these, and the power systems they maintain, have been little discussed. What is a conference supposed to achieve? Who and what is it for? The annual Alliance of Digital Humanities Organization (ADHO)’s Digital Humanities conference is a central occasion in the digital humanities academic calendar, and, as an international, interdisciplinary, regular, long-standing, largescale event, it provides an ideal locus to consider various aspects of contemporary academic conference organization, and how this impacts the shape and definition of a scholarly field. Examining this annual event allows us to clarify ADHO’s policies and procedures to consider how they frame the digital humanities at large. This paper approaches the annual Digital Humanities conference via a Reflection-in-Action and Reflection-on-Action approach encompassing the experiences of various people formally involved in organizing the conference over the past decade. Considering the last seven years of the conference as well as its broader history, we argue that conferences are central mechanisms for agenda setting and fostering a community of digital humanities practitioners. Through analyses of the selection of Program Committees, the choosing of conference themes, the preparation of calls for papers, the peer review process, and the selection of keynotes, we contend that existing structures and processes inadequately address concerns around representation, diversity, multilingualism, and labor. Our recommendations, including aligning the conference budget with its priorities, fostering fair labor practices, and creating accountability structures will be useful to those organizing future Digital Humanities events, and conference organizers throughout academia interested in making academic conferences more inclusive, welcoming environments that encourage a plurality of voices to fully partake in academic discourse.Item George Floyd et l’Afrique: Retour sur le lieu du crime(Cairn, 2021-01) Gondola, Didier; History, School of Liberal ArtsComment la recherche de sciences sociales en et sur l’Afrique a-t-elle évolué durant les quatre dernières décennies ? Quelles sont les lignes et les fractures épistémologiques qui se dessinent aujourd’hui ? Quel sens cela a-t-il de continuer à promouvoir des études africaines dans les universités ? Qui y parle d’Afrique, et à qui ? Ce sont ces questions qui traversent ce double numéro, conçu à l’occasion des 40 ans de Politique africaine. La création de la revue avait marqué un engagement fort, à une époque où les contextes scientifiques, mais aussi politiques et idéologiques, n’étaient pas les mêmes. Les approches par le bas ouvraient la recherche à de nouveaux terrains tout en posant une distance critique à l’égard des compréhensions de l’Afrique focalisées sur les relations de domination entre le continent et le reste du monde. D’autres rapports de domination sont aujourd’hui mis en cause tant à l’intérieur de l’Afrique qu’au sein même du champ des études africaines. Et le continent apparaît comme un espace singulier où questionner plus globalement le devenir du monde à l’ère néolibérale. Rassemblant les contributions d’anthropologues, de démographes, de géographes, d’historiens, de politistes et de sociologues, ce volume éclaire et interroge les passés, les présents et les futurs de l’Afrique des sciences sociales. De bas en haut, débats et combats continuent.