Digital scholarship has many definitions; in fact, an entire website is devoted to randomly returning various answers to the question "What is digital humanities?" But two definitions have come to be generally accepted:
“Digital scholarship is the use of digital evidence and method, digital authoring, digital publishing, digital curation and preservation, and digital use and reuse of scholarship.”
- Abby Smith Rumsey, University of Virginia
“For our purposes, digital scholarship is research and teaching that is made possible by digital technologies, or that takes advantage of them to ask and answer questions in new ways.”
- Melanie Schlosser, The Ohio State University
As both of these definitions demonstrate, digital scholarship essentially does all the things that traditional scholarship does, but with digital technologies that allow us to ask and answer scholarly questions in new ways. So what is scholarship? By looking at the words modified by the adjective "digital" in the above quotes, we can infer a definition of scholarship as it is used in this context:
Scholarship is a process that transforms evidence into something we can use to answer questions.
Scholarship begins when we ask a research question or formulate a teaching objective. The form of this question determines the method we use to transform evidence into answers.
The visible product of scholarship is the result of this transformation.
By authoring or publishing our results, or through the creative curation of source materials, we contribute to the existing body of scholarly materials.
The proper preservation of these materials allows other scholars to reuse our scholarship to start the process all over again.
This guide is designed to help you identify which digital resources can best help you research, process, present, preserve, and teach your scholarship.
Are you interested in digital scholarship? Get in touch! I'm happy to answer questions and support your scholarship. It's helpful to first identify the kind of questions you have about digital scholarship; these questions may include:
Source
Process
Presentation
Preservation
Pedagogy
