1. A New Model for Peer Review of Electronic Scholarly Publication in Language and Literature

The number of scholarly resources available via the Web is increasing dramatically, and many of these resources are disseminated outside of the processes of editorial review traditionally provided by scholarly journals and academic presses. These resources include new genres of scholarly publication such as online electronic archives, databases, and Web sites as well as traditional genres such as articles and reviews that are made available online by individual scholars. The scholarly community needs a means of providing peer review to assess and document the quality of such currently unreviewed online resources.

We propose a project to create a model system of peer review in the field of languages and literatures for online scholarly resources that have not been submitted to the editorial processes of established journals and presses.

The project goals are:

1. To develop principles and procedures for providing peer review for “unpublished” electronic resources in the fields of language and literature.
2. To convene editorial review boards that will provide peer review for a variety of genres, both emerging and traditional, of electronic scholarly publication.
3. To identify emerging genres of scholarly publication in the electronic environment and to create standard descriptors for these genres and to establish guidelines for their evaluation.
4. To encourage the dissemination of scholarship via the Web, especially for projects that may not fit traditional venues of publication.
5. To enable scholars working in new media to receive appropriate peer recognition, legitimization, and institutional reward.
6. To help students and researchers to identify reliable and original online scholarly resources in the fields of language and literature.
7. To report back to the profession the practical and theoretical issues the project has raised about the future of scholarly publication and the institution of peer review in the digital environment.
8. To seek a permanent venue and means of support for the peer review system if the project is deemed successful.

We envision two steps for the project: a four-day planning conference and the creation of a governing board to develop and administer the project over a period of two years.

Planning conference

The project will require an initial planning conference of scholars, computer scientists, librarians, representatives of scholarly societies, and academic publishers. Participants will outline general principles for the project's solicitation, selection, and review of online resources; and consider the professional and technical issues raised by electronic publication outside of traditional venues (e.g., accessibility, indexing, stability and longevity of documents, etc.)

Governing Board

We envision an innovative approach to quality assurance for online publication in the humanities. We therefore propose to assemble a group of scholars in the fields of language and literature, computer scientists, librarians, and academic publishers that will pursue its work for an initial period of two years. This governing board will:

• Solicit online scholarly resources for review.
• Select and convene specialized editorial groups appropriate to review online publication in various genres, both traditional and emerging, as they are submitted for review.
• Develop editorial policies and procedures appropriate to emerging genres of scholarly electronic publication.
• Develop a taxonomy of emerging genres.
• Identify principles and standards for providing peer review outside traditional venues of scholarly publication.
• Report to the field the practical and theoretical issues the project raises about the future of scholarly publication in the digital environment.
• If the project is deemed a success, the board will also seek a permanent venue and means of support for the new peer review system.

The project will be overseen by an editor who will chair the governing board. His or her salary will be paid by the grant, as will other appropriate and necessary support for this work. Members of the governing board and the members of the specialized editorial groups will be volunteer faculty from institutions of higher education.

We encourage NINCH to enlist the support of appropriate scholarly societies and academic publishers in both the planning conference and the project itself. The following members of the NINCH Language and Literature field group expressed interest in participating in this project:

Marie Hansen, Project Muse Director, Johns Hopkins Univ Press, 2715 N Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21218 mhansen@mail.press.jhu.edu

Charles Harris, Professor of English, Illinois State Univ, Normal, IL 61790 cbharri@ilstu.edu

Gail Hawisher, Professor of English, Univ of Illinois, 608 South Wright Street, Urbana, IL 61801 hawisher@uiuc.edu

Matthew Kirschenbaum, Assistant Professor of English, Univ of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40506 mgk@pop.uky.edu

Michael Levenson, Professor of English, Bryan Hall, Univ of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22903 mhc@virginia.edu

Mary Ann Lyman-Hager, Director, National Language Resource Center, San Diego State Univ, San Diego, CA 92182 mlymanha@mail.sdsu.edu

Elaine Martin, Associate Professor of World Literature, Univ of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL 35487 emartin@bama.ua.edu

W.N. Martin, Professor of Computer Science, Thornton Hall, Univ of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22903 martin@virginia.edu

Stuart Moulthrop, Associate Professor of English, Univ of Baltimore, Baltimore, MD 21201 samoulthrop@ubmail.ubalt.edu

Stephen Olsen, Manager and Editor of Electronic Activities, English & Foreign Language Programs, Modern Language Association, 10 Astor Place, New York, NY 10003 steve.olsen@mla.org

Susanna Pathak, Planning & Assessment Librarian, Virginia Commonwealth Univ Libraries, 901 Park Avenue, Richmond, VA 23284-2033 sbpathak@vcu.edu

Marie-Laure Ryan, Independent scholar, 6207 Red Ridge Trail, Bellvue, CO 80512 marilor@uswest.net

Rafael Salaberry, Assistant Professor of Hispanic Studies, Rice Univ, 6100 Main St. MS-34, Houston, TX 77251-1892 salaberry@rice.edu

Cynthia L. Selfe, Professor & Chair of Humanities, Michigan Tech Univ, Houghton, MI 49931 cyselfe@mtu.edu

2. Professional Development

A growing number of electronic scholarly resources and tools are available that language and literature scholars might use to expand both their research and teaching. However, humanists are frequently unaware of these resources and tools and lack adequate preparation to make effective use of them.

In order to acquaint members of the literature and language community with new and emerging technologies, and to help bridge the cultural and methodological gaps between the humanities community and the computer science community, we propose that NINCH and its associated agencies seek funding for professional development projects.

These projects will inspire collaboration between humanists and computer scientists, and will equip humanists to assume responsibility for influencing the evolution of new electronic environments. We envision two formats for these projects:

1. Residential summer institutes (based on the model of NEH Summer Seminars or the National Writing Project), designed to acquaint language and literature teachers and scholars with the tools and methodologies of digital environments so that they may approach electronic technology with increased confidence and understanding, and, as a result, create and implement technological projects at their home institutions. The staff of such institutes would include both technologists and humanists. Applications for such funding would be welcomed not only from existing institutes that require additional support to continue and expand their activities (e.g., to open their workshops to more faculty members or to offer more of them), and also from scholars who wish to establish new institutes.

2. Travel and residency for individual humanists at sites where they can experience focused technological immersion. Two categories of such funding might be:

2.1. attendance at technically oriented conferences (e. g., SIGGRAPH), which generally carry high registration fees that make them inaccessible to most humanist scholars, and;

2.2. site visits to leading technological research or computing environments (e.g., the Electronic Visualization Lab at UIC, or the MIT Media Lab).

The following members of the NINCH Language and Literature field group expressed interest in participating in this project:

Charles Harris, Professor of English, Illinois State Univ, Normal, IL 61790 cbharri@ilstu.edu

Gail Hawisher, Professor of English, Univ of Illinois, 608 South Wright Street, Urbana, IL 61801 hawisher@uiuc.edu

Matthew Kirschenbaum, Assistant Professor of English, Univ of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40506 mgk@pop.uky.edu

D. Terence Langendoen, Department of Linguistics, Univ of Arizona, PO Box 210028, Tucson, Arizona 85721 langendt@arizona.edu

Michael Levenson, Professor of English, Bryan Hall, Univ of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22903 mhc@virginia.edu

Mary Ann Lyman-Hager, Director, National Language Resource Center, San Diego State Univ, San Diego, CA 92182 mlymanha@mail.sdsu.edu

Elaine Martin, Associate Professor of World Literature, Univ of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL 35487 emartin@bama.ua.edu

Marie-Laure Ryan, Independent scholar, 6207 Red Ridge Trail, Bellvue, CO 80512 marilor@uswest.net

Rafael Salaberry, Assistant Professor of Hispanic Studies, Rice Univ, 6100 Main St. MS-34, Houston, TX 77251-1892 salaberry@rice.edu

Cynthia L. Selfe, Professor & Chair of Humanities, Michigan Tech Univ, Houghton, MI 49931 cyselfe@mtu.edu

3. Designing Language Learning Environments for a Multicultural Society (under revision)

See first draft

4. Scholar-Driven Evaluation of Access Mechanisms for Digital Collections

Specialized digital collections contain extensive resources for scholars in the humanities and can be powerful research tools. But access to digitized resources is dependent on indexing systems, database structures, interfaces, and finding aids that are often designed by computer scientists rather than the humanist scholars who use them. We propose a project to bring a team of humanist scholars and computer scientists to evaluate the access mechanisms of a specific digital collection or collections in the field (e.g., the Rossetti collection at the University of Virginia) to determine how these access mechanisms facilitate, hinder, and shape scholarly inquiry in that field.

A major component of the project will be to create methods and procedures for evaluating access to scholarly materials in digital collections. For example, the team might work with the database manager and designers to carry out the following:

• identify the database contents and data model
• design and carry out a representative series of scholarly inquiries of the database
• evaluate the effectiveness of the index with respect to the query results in terms of content and organization
• survey scholarly users of the collection

In addition, the team will create a report for the manager of the collection being evaluated and also create a more general report to the profession that outlines its procedures of evaluation their implications for the future design of access mechanisms to digitized scholarly materials.