genevieve is…

Katie Braun

Katie reported on a case study of evaluation of digital scholarship for tenure and promotion.  She first introduced the criteria used in this one department:

• originality
• lucidity (mostly relevance and understandability to outsiders)
• intellectual depth
• contribution to the field (advances the field, fill a gap)

She then invited a department member to critique several pieces of online scholarship:

• http://www.bgsu.edu/cconline/DavisHardy
  • technology:  basically just uses hyperlinks and otherwise traditional text
  • member’s critique:  pedagogy-focused, doesn’t seem like it needs to be online, unoriginal
• http://english.ttu.edu/KAIROS/8.2/binder.html?features/ellertson/home.html
  • technology:  some flash-based, but working a line between print and multimodal
  • member’s critique: liked the theorization, the ethos of the video, appropriate use of medium
• http://english.ttu.edu/KAIROS/9.1/binder.html?http://www.msu.edu/%7Ecushmane/one/landscape.html
  • technology:  flash-based interface–distant from a textual interface
  • member’s critique:  could not read it because he couldn’t download the plugin in his office computer, quickly dismissed once he read it

Her question is then that it’s incredibly important to have clear definitions of evaluation criteria.  Need to do more to help department members use the criteria appropriately.

Cheryl Ball:  New Media Scholarship:  Taxonomies, Heuristics, & Strategies to Connect (?) Authors, Editors, Departments, & Tenure Committees

Cheryl has collected lists (read:  taxonomies, heuristics, strategies) connected to evaluating digital scholarship.  I’m going to beg her for her works cited page.  Seriously.  She’s created a digital scholarship axis that she first presented at CCCC 2008:

Strategies for Understanding Digital Scholarship

• textual performances
• seminars/colloquia
• in-text reading/analysis guides
• extra-textual T&P binder narratives
• co-articles in print journals

She’s negotiating between her own work and her departmental guidelines.  She would like feedback about what’s going on in all institutions and how work is getting addressed for T&P committees.

Virginia Kuhn

Virginia looked at these same issues from the perspective of authorship, though from a number of authorial perspectives:  the perspectives of published authors, student authors, etc. Looking at:  http://iml.usc.edu/dev/kairos .

General issues:

• the problem of calling scholarship into question
• how to effectively comment on text/sound/image for student drafts

Video issues with putting the site together:

• compatibility
• compression
• uniformity with out losing experimentality

She is going to start using Sophie with her honors students even though there has been concern about standardization.  She thinks it allows the intellectual work to come through.  One her student’s projects:  http://immersiveflow.org/