Software and Scholarship. Andrews, T. 40(4):342–348.
Software and Scholarship [link]Paper  doi  abstract   bibtex   
[excerpt] The thematic focus of this issue is to examine what happens where software and scholarship meet, with particular reference to digital work in the humanities. Despite the some seven decades of its existence, Digital Humanities continues to struggle with the implications, in the academic ecosystem, of its position between engineering and art. [...] [] [...] [] I will end with my own reflection on this topic of evaluation. Peer review of scholarly works of software continues to pose a particularly vexed challenge – who is qualified to carry it out? By what criteria should they evaluate the work? How will the reviewing process essentially function? The amount of time and effort it takes for a peer reviewer to read a discursive journal article and think about its implications tends to exactly fill the amount of time the reviewer has to devote to the task. The act of making proper use of a piece of software, on the other hand, and especially the act of incorporating it into something else being built, has a rather higher minimum cost in terms of time and effort. The number of people who are in a position to provide a good review of any particular piece of scholarly software – those who actually have a use for the software (or at least have suitable digital data on hand to experiment with) as opposed to those who might be able to spare a little theoretical consideration but no more – will always be rather small. Yet the alternative – to disregard the scholarly contribution of a piece of software on the basis that it is too difficult to evaluate – is perhaps the greatest crippling threat to the future of the digital humanities. It is my great hope that the papers collected in this issue will prompt scientists and scholars throughout the wider world of the digital humanities to reflect more productively on the issue of how the authors of scholarly software can be truly and substantially be given the recognition that their work deserves.
@article{andrewsSoftwareScholarship2015,
  title = {Software and Scholarship},
  author = {Andrews, Tara},
  date = {2015-10},
  journaltitle = {Interdisciplinary Science Reviews},
  volume = {40},
  pages = {342--348},
  issn = {1743-2790},
  doi = {10.1080/03080188.2016.1165456},
  url = {http://mfkp.org/INRMM/article/14218691},
  abstract = {[excerpt] The thematic focus of this issue is to examine what happens where software and scholarship meet, with particular reference to digital work in the humanities. Despite the some seven decades of its existence, Digital Humanities continues to struggle with the implications, in the academic ecosystem, of its position between engineering and art. [...]

[] [...]

[] I will end with my own reflection on this topic of evaluation. Peer review of scholarly works of software continues to pose a particularly vexed challenge -- who is qualified to carry it out? By what criteria should they evaluate the work? How will the reviewing process essentially function? The amount of time and effort it takes for a peer reviewer to read a discursive journal article and think about its implications tends to exactly fill the amount of time the reviewer has to devote to the task. The act of making proper use of a piece of software, on the other hand, and especially the act of incorporating it into something else being built, has a rather higher minimum cost in terms of time and effort. The number of people who are in a position to provide a good review of any particular piece of scholarly software -- those who actually have a use for the software (or at least have suitable digital data on hand to experiment with) as opposed to those who might be able to spare a little theoretical consideration but no more -- will always be rather small. Yet the alternative -- to disregard the scholarly contribution of a piece of software on the basis that it is too difficult to evaluate -- is perhaps the greatest crippling threat to the future of the digital humanities. It is my great hope that the papers collected in this issue will prompt scientists and scholars throughout the wider world of the digital humanities to reflect more productively on the issue of how the authors of scholarly software can be truly and substantially be given the recognition that their work deserves.},
  keywords = {*imported-from-citeulike-INRMM,~INRMM-MiD:c-14218691,~to-add-doi-URL,authorship,bias-correction,bias-disembodied-science-vs-computational-scholarship,bias-toward-primacy-of-theory-over-reality,computational-science,free-scientific-software,peer-review,publication-bias,theory-vs-actual-implemetation},
  number = {4}
}

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