Standards for Digital Scholarship
Yesterday, on the University of Washington’s Seattle campus, our local group of HASTAC scholars facilitated a conversation on “Evaluating Digital Scholarship: Expertise, Storage, Design.”
I was glad to see a wide array of folks (from various departments and programs) attend. Now, a day after the event, it strikes me that the question of where digital scholarship is stored (and how it’s stored) especially resonated with the group, as well as the question of what are the standards for digital scholarship.
And I know “standards” can be off-putting for some; nevertheless, there’s a lot to be learned about them from the work of Susan Leigh Star, Geoffrey Bowker, and others in the field of Science and Technology Studies. Put pithily, standards (e.g., metadata standards) aren’t static or inflexible. Of course, they change over time, and those of us who are engaged in digital scholarship might gain a lot from studying how, exactly, standards emerge and how they affect our respective fields, not to mention our everyday lives (for better or worse).
