Digital Scholarship
Digital scholarship involves using the tools, techniques, and results of computational (i.e., digital) technology for research, scholarship, and dissemination. It can involve both the application of digital media, as well as study of it. Digital media simply refers to any media that is encoded with digital means, and includes audio, video, text, and graphics. Digital scholarship also utilizes digital media and social media as valid communication mechanisms. A component of digital scholarship, although not an exclusive one, is “born-digital” media, or media that originated in digital form, such as e-mail correspondence, documents originating in word processor software, electronic records, and, very significantly, social media websites. It is also involved with issues of copyright, fair-use, and the new area of digital rights management, in which access to copyrighted materials is controlled through technological means.
Scholars across many disciplines have been influenced by various digital technologies, developing new methods in the process. Digital media, including videos, online writing, and information visualization now complement traditional texts that were previously the sole means of scholarly discourse (Burdick & Willis, 2011).
Digital scholarship has a synergistic relationship with the digital humanities, and it has been recognized for many years that the former is a “leading force” in the development of the latter (Borgman, 2009). “Scholarly information infrastructure” includes “the technology, services, practices, and policy that support research in all disciplines” (Borgman, 2009). In fact, data-intensive, collaborative, and inter/multi-disciplinary scholarship is enabled by such an infrastructure (Borgman, 2009).
Another primary concern to digital scholarship is the concept of data. In the present context, data can be considered as essential scholarly objects to which digital means of acquisition, processing, analysis, and utilization are applied. As technological advancements increasingly support data analysis and exchange at large scales, data becomes more valuable, as has been evidenced for many years in the environmental and biomedical sciences. In the context of the digital humanities, data, embodied in the availability of vast amounts of text and other digital media facilitates the investigation into the sources of these data. A popular term (and techniques) that is gaining acceptance in digital humanities communities is data mining, which applies statistical, mathematical, and computational techniques to uncover difficult-to-find patterns and anomalies in large data sets, where some of the patterns uncovered were previously unknown or unsuspected. In short, the goal of data mining is the production of new, useful knowledge. Approaches related to data mining include the various types of data analytics and visual analytics that employ quantitative analyses and interactive visualizations (Borgman, 2009), citing Lev Manovich, a leading digital humanities scholar and theorist.
The importance of this area is underscored by the publication of the journal Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (DSH), renamed in 2015, and originally as Literary and Linguistic Computing, which started publication in 1986.
