Definition of Terms

Task Force

Group of individuals assigned a specific task to complete

Wiki

A website that allows visitors to make changes, contributions, or corrections

Authorship

authorship refers to assigning credit to the individual or individuals responsible for the production of the scholarly work. Unlike traditional publications in which authorship is relatively easy to assign to an individual author or a series of co-authors or editors, digital scholarship is frequently more collaborative and authorship is more diffuse. In some fields, such as medicine and the social sciences, authorship is not restricted to writing a manuscript, but may also include those who made significant contributions to conceptualization, revision or review, and realization.

Digital Art and Architectural History

Research focused on significant art and architectural historical problems which include digital and computational methods and tools that are integral to the argument. Digital art and architectural history may be basic or applied research. This may included, but is not limited to: visualizations relying on digital technologies, including 3-D modeling and mapping; research designed for and presented in born-digital platforms; computational methods employed for art historical research (e.g., corpus linguistics); statistical or other digital exploration of big data; production of a digital archive or other online art/architectural historical resource; etc.

Collaborative Research

any art and architectural historical research that involves more than one scholar who has contributed in a significant capacity to the development, content or digital presentation of the scholarship. Collaborators should be acknowledged specifically either in the author byline, in the first footnote or in a similar appropriate site. Collaborators should also be listed according to their contribution, if their contribution is not otherwise clear.

Outcomes

Traditionally, scholarly research requires explicit and defined outcomes in order for it to "count" for promotion and tenure--even though securing funding for research through grants, fellowships, etc., is a kind of an outcome, since it demonstrates the importance of the research. Traditional outcomes include publishing or otherwise distributing the findings of the research in the form of articles, books, exhibitions, lectures, etc. For digital scholarship, the definition of outcomes must be more expansive to include a broad range of digital and/or web-based work.

Peer Review

Peer review is the evaluation of scholarly work or research by a relevant expert in order to determine if the work should be published or the research should be funded. For promotion and tenure, peer reviewed work is generally given more weight than non-peer reviewed work. Peer review of digital scholarship is still in flux because the standards and methods of review for databases, GIS, modeling and other digital outcomes are different than for traditional publications, regardless of whether these are print or digital.

Process

process indicates the intellectual give and take that occurs in the formation of a final argument. In digital art/architectural history, process is often included separately as a "Project Narrative" that clarifies the methodological decisions and implications that led to the final work.

Project Narrative

an account of the process by which the scholar and/or her collaborators developed the final argument. Project narratives must include information on the development or application of digital technologies central to the scholarship. They should also indicate the contribution of various collaborators.

Publication

making a work public. Scholarly publication specifically means that a work is made public in a form that is accessible to peer review, with the goal of ensuring accuracy, authenticity, and scholarly value. In the print-on-paper regime, processes for submission, review, and formal publication was normalized through books and journals. Long-term access to those publications was secured through libraries. Digital publishing genres, review processes, and warrants of long-term access are still moot.

Research

Research in digital art and architectural history can have specific uses and applications that should be described and recognized in the review and hiring process. These include:

A) Developmental Digital Humanities Research

Digital Art and Architectural History that focuses particular attention on conceptualizing and implementing significant programming, coding or the development of tools and other technologies that are of value to art and architectural historical research. This may include, for example, developing a new means of visualizing historical buildings and environments.

B) Research that Uses Digital Methods

Digital Art and Architectural History research that takes preexisting digital tools or methods and applies them to art historical problems with little to no change to the digital tool itself. This may include, for example, the use of GIS to explore spatial distribution of galleries in a specific place and time or contributions to databases and other digital resources that expand but do not change the dataset.

C) Experimental Research that Combines Digital and Humanities Methods

Projects that clearly articulate research questions that combine both art and architectural historical problems and methods with computational problems and methods. This may include, for example, the analysis of a "big data" set of codices through corpus linguistics that both advances the interpretation of the art historical significance of the data set as well as offers new digital methods and insights in corpus linguistics.

Scholarly Practice

the work of the art/architectural historian, including both process and outcomes (or research and publications), as informed/shaped by methodologies, resources, and technologies.