We gots the skillz
I spent a fair bit of time reading this examination of scholarly digital projects in literature (specifically American literature).
As the authors themselves say, if you’ve kept your eyes open for a while, there isn’t much here that’s new. Old-school tenure committees won’t give digital editions any credibility. Creating a good digital edition takes time, money, and technical skill, none of which grows on trees. The academy is far more eager to consume digital texts than produce them. Some folks are dog-in-the-manger, seeing no benefit to sharing their work for others to use or expand upon; others won’t participate in a digital project they can’t sell. (Before you laugh, librarians, I heard a librarian espouse precisely that latter attitude a week or so ago. Dogs in our manger too.)
Read carefully, though. Watch the negative spaces; what’s missing from the discourse?
Right. Libraries and librarians. Other than a few tentative mentions of institutional repositories, and some lip service to “hey, maybe we oughta get the librarians involved,” we might as well not exist.
Who’s got the technical skill to do TEI right? We do, damn straight. (In passing, I note another disadvantage to losing track of former graduate students. In the case of medievalists, certainly, you lose a lot of potential text geeks.) Who’ll commit to keeping a digital project available indefinitely without so much as breaking a URL? Hell yeah, we will. Where do you find geeks with advanced degrees in the humanities? Among us, you better bloody well believe. For whom are digital projects a welcome and expected part of the job? For us. Not you. Us. Us librarians.
Where are the partnerships? Where?
Eh, well. Some colleagues and I are trying to nurture a nibble from a faculty member who means well, but doesn’t quite know what to ask us for. Of such seeds are great things born, I dearly hope.