The Modern Language Association has released "Guidelines for Evaluating Work in Digital Humanities and Digital Media." This is the first update in 12 years.

Here's an excerpt:

The following guidelines are designed to help departments and faculty members implement effective evaluation procedures for hiring, reappointment, tenure, and promotion. They apply to scholars working with digital media as their subject matter and to those who use digital methods or whose work takes digital form.

| Digital Scholarship's Digital/Print Books | Digital Scholarship |

The Association of College & Research Libraries has established a Digital Humanities Discussion Group.

Read more about it at "New ACRL Discussion Groups."

| Reviews of Digital Scholarship Publications | Digital Scholarship |

The National Endowment for the Humanities is accepting grant proposals for its Humanities Collections and Reference Resources program.

Here's an excerpt from the program guidelines:

Applications may be submitted for projects that address one or more of the following activities:

• arranging and describing archival and manuscript collections;
• cataloging collections of printed works, photographs, recorded sound, moving images, art, and material culture;
• providing conservation treatment (including deacidification) for collections, leading to enhanced access;
• digitizing collections;
• preserving and improving access to born-digital sources;
• developing databases, virtual collections, or other electronic resources to codify information on a subject or to provide integrated access to selected humanities materials; . . . .
• developing tools for spatial analysis and representation of humanities data, such as atlases and geographic information systems (GIS); and
• designing digital tools to facilitate use of humanities resources.

| Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography 2010 | Digital Scholarship |

The first issue of the Journal of Digital Humanities has been published by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media.

Here's an excerpt from the "A Community-Sourced Journal":

We're pleased to present the inaugural issue of the Journal of Digital Humanities, which represents the best of the work that was posted online by the community of digital humanities scholars and practitioners in the final three months of 2011. . . .

The works in this issue were first highlighted on the Digital Humanities Now site and its related feeds. . . .

Once highlighted as an "Editors' Choice" on Digital Humanities Now, works were eligible for inclusion in the Journal of Digital Humanities. By looking at a range of qualitative and quantitative measures of quality, from the kinds of responses a work engendered, to the breadth of the community who felt it was worth their time to examine a work, to close reading and analyses of merit by the editorial board and others, we were able to produce the final list of works. For the inaugural issue, more than 15,000 items published or shared by the digital humanities community last quarter were reviewed for Digital Humanities Now. Of these, 85 were selected as Editors' Choices, and from these 85 the ones that most influenced the community, as measured by interest, transmission, and response, have been selected for formal publication in the Journal. The digital humanities community participated further in the review process through open peer review of the pieces selected for the Journal. Authors selected for inclusion were given time to revise their work to answer criticisms and suggestions from the community and editors, prior to a round of careful editing to avoid typographical errors and other minor mistakes.

| Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography 2010: "SEP [Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography] is compiled with utter professionalism. It reminds me of the work of the best artisans who know not only every item that leaves their workshops, but each component used to create them—providing the ideal quality control." — Péter Jacsó ONLINE 27, no. 3 (2003): 73-76. | Digital Scholarship |

The National Endowment for the Humanities's Office of Digital Humanities has announced the recipients of 22 new Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants.

The announcement was part of a larger announcement of $17 million in grants for 208 humanities projects. A state-by-state list of these grants is available.

| Institutional Repository and ETD Bibliography 2011 | Digital Scholarship |

Nicholas W. Jankowski, Andrea Scharnhorst, Clifford Tatum, and Zuotian Tatum have self-archived "Enhancing Scholarly Publications: Developing Hybrid Monographs in the Humanities and Social Sciences" in SSRN.

Here's an excerpt:

Enhancing publications has a long history but is gaining acceleration as authors and publishers explore electronic tablets as devices for dissemination and presentation. Enhancement of scholarly publications, in contrast, more often takes place in a Web environment and is coupled with presentation of supplementary materials related to research. The approach to enhancing scholarly publications presented in this article goes a step further and involves the interlinking of the "objects" of a document: datasets, supplementary materials, secondary analyses, and post-publication interventions. This approach connects the user-centricity of Web 2.0 with the Semantic Web. It aims at facilitating long-term content structure through standardized formats intended to improve interoperability between concepts and terms within and across knowledge domains. We explored this conception of enhancement on a small set of books prepared for traditional academic publishers. While the project was primarily an exercise in development, the conclusion section of the article reflects on areas where conceptual and empirical studies could be initiated to complement this new direction in scholarly publishing.

For related information, see the SURF Enhancing Scholarly Publishing in the Humanities and Social Sciences project website.

| Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography, Version 80 | Digital Scholarship |

Virgil E.Varvel, Jr. and Andrea Thomer have self-archived the Google Digital Humanities Awards Recipient Interviews Report in IDEALS.

Here's an excerpt:

As input into the development, design, and improvement of the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC), recipients of Google's Digital Humanities Grants were interviewed to identify issues encountered during their projects. This project was guided by the following goals:

• Increase empirical understanding of how to identify materials for use by scholars.
• Increase empirical understanding of how to provide better access to materials for use by scholars.
• Identify meaningful characteristics of content that affect identification, retrieval, and other parameters.
• Identify data preprocessing and transformation issues encountered by scholars.
• Provide input to inform the architecture of the HTRC related to representation of collections, faceted browsing, identifiers, etc.

|Institutional Repository and ETD Bibliography 2011 | Digital Scholarship |

The NEH's Office of Digital Humanities has released short videos of project directors of 2011 Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants discussing their projects.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

We're happy to say that we now have videos from the annual Office of Digital Humanities Project Directors Meeting, held September 27, 2011 at the Old Post Office in Washington, DC. This meeting brought together top researchers in the digital humanities from across the United States.

| Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography 2010 | Digital Scholarship |

Ithaka S+R has released the Ithaka S+R Research Support Services for Scholars: History Project. Interim Report: Interviews with Research Support Professionals.

Here's an excerpt:

Funded by the NEH, Ithaka S+R’s History Project, part of the Research Support Services for Scholars Program, will explore the information support needs and changing research practices of academic historians in the United States. The evolution of technology and its impact on scholarship in the humanities has sparked and sustained the wide-spread Digital Humanities movement. Historians in particular have engaged new technologies, and the subsequently enabled research methodologies and publication platforms are transforming the field. Consequently, many support service providers would like to better understand the evolving practices of historians and adapt their services to facilitate these new processes.

For the first phase of the Research Support Services for Scholars History Project, Ithaka S+R interviewed professionals who work in support of the scholarly life cycle of historians. Before interviewing faculty directly, it was important to establish an understanding of the breadth of support available to history faculty on campus, as well as the environment and institutions that support their research from concept to publication. The goal for this set of interviews was to explore the different types of service models currently engaged for supporting history research on campus and the challenges that research support professionals are facing in today’s rapidly evolving research environment.

| Digital Scholarship's Digital/Print Books | Digital Scholarship |

The Journal of Digital Humanities will launch this March.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Digital Humanities Now is pleased to announce the Journal of Digital Humanities (ISSN 2165-6673), forthcoming in March 2012. In this comprehensive, peer-reviewed journal we will feature the best scholarship, projects, and tools produced by the digital humanities community in the previous quarter.

The Journal of Digital Humanities will offer expanded coverage of the digital humanities in three ways. First, we publish scholarly work beyond the traditional research article. Second, we select content from open and public discussions in the field. Third, we encourage continued discussion through peer-to-peer review.

The journal will be comprised of individual works that were selected as Editors' Choice in Digital Humanities Now. These works range from written texts, to visual arguments, to audio-visual presentations. In order to promote the peer review of non-traditional scholarship, each issue will include solicited reviews of digital tools. When the community focuses extensively on a particular topic, a special section of the issue will feature the broader conversation. In our inaugural issue, Natalia Cecire, a postdoctoral fellow at the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Emory University, will introduce and guest edit a special section about theory and the digital humanities.

| Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography, Version 80 | Digital Scholarship |

The Council on Library and Information Resources and the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education will launch Anvil Academic, a "digital publisher for the humanities," in late 2012.

Here's an excerpt from the press release :

Anvil will focus on publishing new forms of scholarship that cannot be adequately conveyed in the traditional monograph.

"Increasingly, research in the humanities is dependent on large data sets and involves sophisticated algorithms and visualizations in the execution of that research and in the construction of the products of scholarship. Anvil will capture the environment in which this research is conducted: a linked ecology of scholarly expression, data, and tools of analysis that will over time become itself a place for new knowledge discovery," said CLIR President Chuck Henry.

Works published through Anvil will be available through Creative Commons licenses on the Web and as apps on portable devices. The title production system will be developed jointly by NITLE and CLIR for use by other institutions, each of which would have the opportunity to publish under its own imprint. . . .

"An important part of the Anvil experiment will be developing and testing new revenue models," said NITLE Executive Director Joey King. "Our current models, which rely heavily on institutional subsidies, author subventions, and revenue from sales of printed books, are not proving to be sustainable. With Anvil, we intend to explore alternative paths to sustainability as rigorously as we explore new publishing models."

The program received startup funding from the Brown Foundation, Inc., in Houston, Texas. Stanford University, the University of Virginia, Washington University in St. Louis, Bryn Mawr College, Amherst College, Middlebury College, and Southwestern University will also provide funds and staffing. Anvil Academic Publishing will work closely with innovative programs developed by the University of Michigan, especially MPublishing, and draw on Johns Hopkins University's exemplary experience with digital humanities project development.

| Digital Scholarship's Digital/Print Books | Digital Scholarship |

The Association of Research Libraries has released the Digital Humanities, SPEC Kit 326.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has published Digital Humanities, SPEC Kit 326, which provides a snapshot of research library experiences with digital scholarship centers or services that support the humanities (e.g., history, art, music, film, literature, philosophy, religion, etc.) and the benefits and challenges of hosting them. The survey asked ARL libraries about the organization of these services, how they are staffed and funded, what services they offer and to whom, what technical infrastructure is provided, whether the library manages or archives the digital resources produced, and how services are assessed, among other questions. . . .

The table of contents and executive summary from this SPEC Kit are available online at http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/spec-326-web.pdf.

| Digital Scholarship's Digital/Print Books | Digital Scholarship |