BY TERRY CARTER

High-quality academic scholarship often goes unpublished due to lack of space and increased competition for peer-reviewed and other traditional print publications. Would clear and highly visible higher education guidelines encourage institutions to accept digital scholarship? I argued for such guidelines in a presentation entitled “Academic Freedom in the Digital Technology Age: Exploring Guidelines for Evaluating Digital Scholarship for Faculty Promotion and Evaluations” during the fall 2016 AAUP Shared Governance Conference in Washington, DC. Most of the presentation’s audience members agreed with the outlined and discussed arguments and rationale. Ultimately what I learned was that my views and the AAUP presentation audience views were in alignment relative to both the possibilities and perils of engaging in digital scholarship to enhance faculty performance requirements.

My presentation was based on professional experiences and the results of an IRB-approved study centered on a survey questionnaire. The survey questions were designed to elicit responses that would help capture perceptions of others at my institution about the value of nontraditional methods of disseminating scholarship. Two basic questions were asked: (1) Do you believe digital scholarship or creativity (exclusively online journal, informational websites, blogs, podcast, etc.) should count toward tenure and promotion? and (2) Do you agree or disagree that “Digital Scholarship holds potential to be weighted equally alongside peer-reviewed print publications”? My survey data results could not be generalized due to sample size; however, I learned that most of the survey participants—like those of my conference audience—did indeed recognize both the constraints and the opportunities of digital scholarship.

Affirmed by my survey results and the presentation feedback, I began to develop digital scholarship projects aimed at testing the waters during my annual evaluation. I found my opportunity when I was invited to write an article about mentoring that would be disseminated as a blog post on a higher education organization’s website. The article was subsequently reviewed and edited by the marketing and leadership team before publication. Mission accomplished—I had achieved the first step in testing the survey results.

My satisfaction later turned sour after learning during my annual evaluation review that my department had not yet developed guidelines that would clearly recognize my digital blog publication. After that sobering experience, I decided to dig a bit deeper into the history of digital scholarship before committing additional time toward developing my other digital projects.

So, during the summer of 2018, I explored my institution’s library databases for reading material to increase my knowledge about the concept of digital scholarship. In addition to searching the library databases, I reviewed departmental, college, and university-level guidelines available on the internet that described faculty expectations for research and scholarly activities. Upon completion of my exploration, my understanding of the possibilities and perils of pursuing digital scholarship had indeed increased. Below is a short list of what I learned that may be of value to others interested in pursuing digital scholarship:

• Understandings of the term “digital scholarship” tend to vary; the term may refer to research about the impact of digital publications as well as digital platforms used to disseminate scholarship. Due to multiple discipline-specific engagements with digital scholarship, users of the term should provide a contextualized definition for reviewers of such works.
• The question of how to assess digital scholarship has been an ongoing conversation for at least two decades. In fact, the Modern Language Association (MLA) approved “Guidelines for Evaluating Work in Digital Humanities and Digital Media” in May 2000 to help disciplines contextualize the credibility of this type of scholarship.
• Perceptions about the quality and significance of digital publications in the academy are often less favorable in comparison to traditional print and peer reviewed publications.
• Sole reliance on “digital scholarship” such as academic blogs, deposits in digital repositories, and multimedia platforms is not recommended for faculty who are required to publish scholarship for promotion and tenure.

Based on this research and my own experience, I would advise untenured professors to be careful when pursuing digital scholarship projects in order to satisfy scholarly and creative publication requirements. I strongly recommend reviewing specific departmental, college, and institutional guidelines before investing time in pursuing digital publication project. If guidelines are located, then discuss the guidelines with faculty performance review committees and other evaluators to gain a realistic understanding of how those guidelines are often interpreted by decision makers; doing so may provide insight into perceptions of digital scholarship that cannot be ascertained solely from written guidelines. If guidelines are not located, strategically seek out instances of discipline-specific support for digital scholarship and seek out assistance from senior faculty who may be able to offer collegial support and suggestions.

Readers are most likely aware that upcoming generations of academic professionals must increasingly invest in digital scholarship to maintain disciplinary relevance due to increased competition for publication in fewer traditional peer-reviewed outlets. I therefore strongly encourage those already tenured or in senior rank faculty positions to consider digital scholarship activities in order to set precedents that will hopefully benefit junior faculty and can later become the basis of written guidelines. For example, through their audio and digital scholarship, senior faculty members in my department are changing the faculty evaluation process. Language to legitimize academic blog posts, website projects, online journals, and other digital and multimedia projects has been drafted for inclusion in our departmental bylaws and other documents that govern annual reviews and promotion and tenure. While senior faculty may benefit from these clearer guidelines during annual reviews, junior faculty will benefit the most because they will not be required to provide extraordinary justifications for their digital scholarship activities and publications. Moreover, junior faculty not yet engaged in digital scholarship may now begin to see it as a viable and legitimate option for publication and dissemination of their research.

Guest blogger Terry Carter is professor of English at Kennesaw State University. His research and publication interests are in the areas of online pedagogy, digital scholarship, and African American studies.