Library Guides: Digital Scholarship: Evaluating Digital Scholarship

Evaluation Methods

Peer evaluation is an important part of scholarly publication. But how should nontraditional scholarly output be evaluated? In this section, we'll provide brief suggestions for evaluating digital scholarship and a curated list of peer-reviewed journals that review and publish on digital scholarship or digital humanities projects.

Scholarship: Is the project intellectually rigorous? Is the methodology sound? Are arguments properly developed?
Technology: Is the technical design sound? Does it make use of appropriate digital tools, or create robust technologies for use in the field? Is the site interoperable? Does it use appropriate web standards?
Audience: Does the project effectively engage academic and public audiences?
Editorial quality: Are appropriate editorial standards, such as TEI, used? Is the site clear and free from grammatical or spelling issues? Is the site accessible? Is a metadata schema used consistently?
Sustainability: Does the project address digital preservation?

Vol. 1, No. 4 of the Journal of Digital Humanities presents a number of comprehensive approaches for evaluating digital scholarship. This issue should be consulted to gain a better understanding of the complexities and considerations of evaluating digital scholarship.

Closing the Evaluation Gap
Vol. 1, No. 4 of the Journal of Digital Humanities contains several detailed approaches for evaluating digital scholarship.

Peer Reviewed Journals

Find a journal to evaluate or publish on digital scholarship.

dh+lib
dh+lib "aims to provide a communal space where librarians, archivists, LIS graduate students, and information specialists of all stripes can contribute to a conversation about digital humanities and libraries." (dh+lib)
Digital Humanities Now
"Digital Humanities Now is an experimental, edited publication that highlights and distributes informally published digital humanities scholarship and resources from the open web." (DHNow)
Digital Humanities Quarterly
DHQ is "an open-access, peer-reviewed, digital journal covering all aspects of digital media in the humanities." (DHQ)
Digital Medievalist
"Digital Medievalist publishes work of original research and scholarship, theoretical articles on digital topics, notes on technological topics, commentary pieces discussing developments in the field, bibliographic and review articles, tutorials, and project reports. The journal also commissions reviews of books and major electronic sites and projects." (DM)
Digital Scholarship in the Humanities
"Digital Scholarship in the Humanities is an international, peer reviewed journal which publishes original contributions on all aspects of digital scholarship in the Humanities." (DSH)
Digital Studies / Le Champ Numérique
"Digital Studies / Le champ numérique is a refereed academic journal that serves as an Open Access area for formal scholarly activity and as a resource for researchers in the Digital Humanities." (DSCN)
Journal of Cultural Analytics
CA aims "to promote high quality scholarship that applies computational and quantitative methods to the study of cultural objects (sound, image, text), cultural processes (reading, listening, searching, sorting, hierarchizing) and cultural agents (artists, editors, producers, composers)." (CA)
Journal of Data Mining & Digital Humanities
"The Journal of Data Mining & Digital Humanities is concerned with the intersection of computing and the disciplines of the humanities, with tools provided by computing such as data visualisation, information retrieval, statistics, text mining by publishing scholarly work beyond the traditional humanities." (JDMDH)
Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy
JITP seeks to "promote open scholarly discourse around critical and creative uses of digital technology in teaching, learning, and research." (JITP)
Reviews in Digital Humanities
"Reviews in Digital Humanities is a pilot of a peer-reviewed journal that facilitates scholarly evaluation of digital humanities work and its outputs." (Reviews in DH)
Startwords
"Startwords is a forum for experimental humanities scholarship. Embedded code, data physicalizations, design, and emerging forms of process documentation are detailed through writing that is essayistic, creative, and research-driven." (Startwords)