Tenure, Promotion and Digital Publication Joseph Raben Joseph Raben Queens College, City University of New York joeraben@ncsa.uiuc.edu

Joseph Raben is a professor emeritus of English at Queens College of the City University of New York, where he taught for 30 years. Before that he was a teaching fellow at Indiana University and an instructor at Princeton University. He was awarded a B.A. with honors at the University of Wisconsin and a Ph.D. at Indiana University, where he minored in folklore under Stith Thompson. His bachelor's honors thesis was on pronunciation as revealed by rhyme schemes in American folksongs, and his doctoral dissertation studied folk speech in Scott's novels. After graduating from Wisconsin, he worked as an engineering aide on the construction of the Hanford Engineer Works, and then entered the Army, where he was trained in spoken Japanese and served in Tokyo as an editor of translations in the Allied Translator and Interpreter Service, attached to GHQ. In this service he translated documents used in the war crimes trials.

At Queens he developed an interest in using computers in humanities research and in 1966 founded the innovative journal Computers and the Humanities to provide a platform for younger pioneering scholars to publish their research. He both edited and carried a large share of this journal's publication chores for 20 years. Among its most useful features was a semiannual Directory of Scholars Active, which informed practitioners around the world of recent applications of computer technology to humanities and related social science problems. These notes he cumulated into a print volume, Computer-Assisted Research in the Humanities (New York: Pergamon Press, 1977). In 1978 he founded the Association for Computers and the Humanities and served as its president for two years before turning it over to younger successors. During this same period, he helped to organize several international conferences at the University of Southern California, Grinnell College, Dartmouth College, Rutgers University, North Carolina State University and Auburn University. He also presented papers at many international conferences organized by others and represented humanities computing at conferences organized by groups within the computer industry, such as the ACM, the American Federation of Information Processing Societies, the International Federation for Information Processing, and the American Society for Information Science. He organized special interest groups at several MLA conventions and within the ACM. He was an invited lecturer at academic institutions all over the United States, Canada, and Western Europe, and in India, China, and Japan. Much of the same effort was contained in articles published in a variety of journals, along with his contributions to Shelley scholarship, some of it based on the manuscript materials in the Bodleian Library.

 000006 001 1 opinion 3 April 2007

Authored for DHQ; migrated from original DHQauthor format

 DHQ classification scheme; full list available in the DHQ keyword taxonomy Keywords supplied by author; no controlled vocabulary Encoded revised article Removed empty abstract, Re-ordered author/name (first,last) Minor wording change per Raben request, and updated author email address Updated revisionDesc format, added publicationStmt, added blank teaser and abstract for validation with new schema Added bio from bios.xml Changed emph elements to title in bio

The launching of an online journal like Digital Humanities Quarterly represents much that is positive about the current status of our community and much that still must be accomplished. It is satisfying to see a totally online scholarly publication, especially one that seeks to fill the niche created 40 years ago by Computers and the Humanities, a repository for information on the evolving relationship between humanistic endeavors and computer technology. That the technology this new journal employs is also the one that it studies can be counted as a step forward. At the same time, however, the absence of parallel publications in other sectors of humanities research is a measure of the distance still to be traveled before computer publishing is regarded as fully equal to the book and the print journal.

Underlying the status of online publication as an inferior medium is probably the concern on the part of potential contributors that appearance in electronic media is not as highly regarded by the gatekeepers of tenure and promotion as the traditional hard-bound book and the article offprint, at least in the humanities. In the survey of attitudes among chairs and deans of all academic disciplines I organized in 1980, long before even the Internet had developed, much less the World Wide Web and the widespread availability of personal computers and laptops, the opinion of only half the respondents was in favor of treating online publication, even with all the traditional safeguards of peer review and editorial control, as earning the same credit toward tenure and promotion as was provided by traditional publication. How much the balance has tilted in favor of the newer technology has not (to my knowledge) been measured recently. A study of language departments conducted by the Modern Language Association is mentioned below.

This reluctance to provide wider and less costly access to humanities scholarship represents a disjuncture with the expectations of the potential audience for this information. The generation of students in our graduate schools today has already become completely at ease with computers and online communication. Even in their non-academic activities, theses students rely increasingly on computers for access to information of almost every sort. In their academic activities they download electronic information to such an extent that their instructors must plead for at least the partial use of print media. Now, with the drive promoted by Google to scan the contents of several major university and public libraries, the time is drawing close when very few reasons will remain to argue the superiority of books and print journals over online databases. Thus the arguments for directing publishing scholars toward the devious route of publishing new material in print, only to have it then scanned for online access become increasingly illogical.

The time it will take for the academic establishment to recognize the value of online publication is a function of its willingness to accept the replacement of a system that has seemed to operate relatively well until now. Books and print articles have been the stairs leading to the tenure, promotion, higher salaries and reduced teaching loads that are the system’s rewards for scholarly industry. When deans and even chairs are incapable of evaluating the content of such publications, they have been able to rely on the number of a candidate’s publications, their substance, the prestige of their publishers and (to a limited extent in the humanities) the number of times they are cited elsewhere.

With understandable ergophobia, these administrators do not eagerly anticipate learning a new system without these comforting means of measuring accomplishment. The latest newsletter of the Modern Language Association announces that 40.8% of departments in doctorate-granting institutions report no experience in evaluating refereed articles in electronic format, and 65.7% report no experience in evaluating monographs in electronic format. How daring must a pioneering candidate for tenure and/or promotion be to risk career advancement in this dangerous environment?

Digital Humanities Quarterly therefore strikes out a new path for humanities scholarship. The journal’s long-term success may well establish a pattern followed by humanities journals devoted to topics other than the application of the technology. If so, future issues may need to consider the consequences of that wider adoption of this publication mode. And future articles in this space can consider the implications of our impact on the evolution of academe.