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By Alec

There’s certainly a lot to be discussed regarding the priorities, arguments, and omissions of the AHA’s “Guidelines for the Professional Evaluation of Scholarship in History”, but I want to offer up thoughts on just one quote that caught my attention. Most of the items on the list of issues to consider when evaluating digital work were pretty tame and difficult to object, but this one did strike me as a little odd:

“Digital scholarship should be evaluated in its native digital medium, not printed out for inclusion in review materials. Evaluators need to understand how a project works, what capacities it possesses, and how well those capacities perform. This can only be done by actually using the interface.” (5)

I can definitely see where they’re coming from, since many digital projects would definitely lose most if not all of their essence and argument if you just clicked “Ctrl-P” and picked up a copy of the webpage from the printer. On the other hand, not all digital scholarship is interactive, and therefore not all digital scholarship demands analysis in its “native medium.” A static infographic or graph or social network would likely translate well to paper, and I can even imagine some instances when it might even be useful or advantageous to do so – a particularly detailed visualization, for example, might benefit from being “blown up” into a large physical poster than can be annotated and marked-up. Furthermore, it’s often the case that only parts of a digital project demand a digital viewing. Introductions, analyses, or other written/typed components read just as well, I think, on paper.

The AHA’s request that digital scholarship be viewed in its native form points to, but does not directly address the larger issue of determining and defining “native medium” online. The digital world, which is all about recreation and remediation, almost intrinsically defies the idea of a native medium. Obviously the break between print and digital work is a significant and dramatic one, but within the digital realm there are still infinitely many ways to consume and interpret media. A site viewed on a smartphone will function differently from the same site as seen on a projector screen. An old, CRT monitor will depict images differently from a 4K flat-screen. Even software differences, however minor, can generate huge discrepancies in functionality and presentation. Should a site be viewed in FireFox or Chrome, on a Mac or a Windows PC, with an ad blocker or without one? Does a project rehosted or reposted on a different site carry the same import as its original location on the author’s blog? With sound effects turned on or off?

The other, happier side of this issue is also the best counterargument: that at the end of the day, for most sites and projects it probably doesn’t matter that much where and how you access it. Admin’s point about the flexibility of many video games to adapt to the skill of the player can be read more broadly, I think, as indication of the digital world’s ability to adapt to a multitude of interfaces, softwares, machines, and users. Native medium matters, but maybe only to the extent that it affects or hinders functionality or usability. The AHA may have more issues analyzing a website in a browser without the latest version of Flash than in printing out a hard copy.

Works Cited

American Historical Association, Ad Hoc Committee on Professional Evaluation of Digital Scholarship by Historians. “Guidelines for the Professional Evaluation of Scholarship in History.” Historians.org. n.p., Apr. 2015. Web. 30 Apr. 2015.