Digital Scholarship is application of digital methods to research questions
Digital scholarship can be broadly defined as the thoughtful, theoretically and ethically informed use of digital evidence, methods of inquiry, research, publication and preservation to achieve scholarly and research goals.
There’s a lot more focus on collaboration and being interdisciplinary than in traditional approaches, in part because the tools and methods used are more complex than traditional methods, and require a range of expertise beyond what a single scholar can cover. Many historians are trained to work on their own, and aren’t great at collaborating especially across disciplines. Getting them to realise that collaboration can be helpful can be tricky.
Digital scholarship opens up new ways of exploring existing research questions, generates new questions, and can help with expanding the audience of scholarship and sharing knowledge in new ways. The work undertaken with digital methods needs to be integrated with more traditional approaches, considering what benefits or unique insights are presented by the digital methods.
Scholarship created and presented in a digital format, rather than something static like a book or article, needs additional consideration about how the data will be stored and maintained, and who can access it. The work is iterative, rather than a linear process towards a single end result. Maintenance is an ongoing process, and one we aren’t particularly good at so far - the problem of link rot and dead projects is real and present even in the materials for this course.
Preservation of research and maintenance of things is a problem. Custom development is therefore often less useful than sticking with something commercial. Libraries know things like creating universal locators. Doing migration can be hard for technologists, as they don’t necessarily know the meaning of the resources they are working with.