Net-Scholarship – Digital Academics & the Biblical-Theological World
Tom Scheinfeldt at Found History has posted a thought provoking article dealing with digital academics: Making It Count: Toward a Third Way. Scheinfeldt is willing to agree with Mills Kelly’s division of digital academic studies into: 1) digital “scholarship” which leans more toward traditional scholarship with some sort of modified peer review system; and 2) digital “work” which involves collaborative development of databases, etc. Although it may be difficult to “count” digital “work” for the purposes of tenure in the USA educational system, Scheinfeldt wants to bring more dignity to this digital “work” category, an idea that I would agree strongly.
In terms of biblical and theological studies, collaborative digital works are growing all the time. In fact in a two part lecture on digital research methods last trimester, I argued that in both the internet and digital media arena primary sources are increasing. By this I am referring to projects to bring biblical manuscripts online, whether NT manuscripts or the Dead Sea Scrolls. The impact of these projects, I believe will be great in the fields of text criticism and exegesis. However digital scholarship has been slow in developing when it comes to the production of secondary literature. The few open access digital journals provide a first step, but the digital “work” materials far outstrip the digital scholarship. Furthermore younger scholars feel that they need to make themselves known via the more traditional monograph type of publications or getting an article published in a reputable peer review based journal. This very idea implies that scholarship has not been able to integrate the digital world into their value system, although they are more than willing to utilize the benefits of the digital databases that have been produced.
As long as there is a two-tiered or maybe even three-tiered division (traditional monographs / journal articles, digital scholarship, digital work) existing in the academic world, the next stage research development will be difficult. I am personally unsure why digital works would not be esteemed on the same level as traditional or digital scholarship, since bibliographies, lexicography and editing of concordances and other source materials have been considered important scholarship when it was done in “paper” form. With the growing cost of academic publications it seems that the time to make a major shift has come.
See also the two quotes that Andy Naselli cites in his review of John Mark Reynolds and Roger Overton’s, The New Media Frontier: Blogging, Vlogging, and Podcasting for Christ, concerning the cost of academic publishing. The New Media Frontier. (HT: The Future of Academic Publishing at the Logos blog.)
