Table of Contents
Principles of Peer Review
ARC offers peer review of digital humanities projects in any field. For projects that would be well suited to one of our existing nodes, node-level editorial boards govern both content and technical review. For projects outside of our current nodes, ARC has a separate technical review board and seeks out content-level experts on a case-by-case basis.
Projects receive both content-level and technical review, and they must meet the standards of both to be eligible for inclusion in ARC’s catalog. For projects that fall short of these criteria, particularly in terms of technical standards, ARC offers guidance to bring the projects in line with current best practices as established by the broader digital humanities community.
One of ARC’s founding principles is the need for digital humanities work to be valued appropriately by academic institutions. Toward this end, ARC’s peer review letters take into consideration international academic standards (such as the REF in the UK) to attest to the scholarly value of each project. ARC is happy to provide letters for promotion and tenure cases.
Our peer review guidelines have been developed based on careful research on best practices within the digital humanities, and may be found below.
Peer Review Guidelines
ARC considers two overarching questions pertinent to the peer review of scholarly digital resources:
1. Is the content important and interesting to existing scholarship?
2. Is the material presented in a clear, accessible, well-organized, and well-documented fashion?
While the first question parallels traditional reviews of scholarly materials by considering the intellectual content and originality of the resource and/or the resource’s argument, the second allows the nodes’ editorial boards to promote, encourage, and reward scholars for adhering to standards that have been developed by the digital humanities community. The ARC nodes will peer review any site, regardless of format, but we encourage resources to think of interface design in terms of navigation, searchability, documentation, and interoperability. As a way of encouraging interoperability, node directors and project managers recommend that resources use community standards such as TEI, as well as best practices in creating and presenting databases, images, video, and audio.
Whether undergoing peer review by NINES, 18thConnect, or MESA, ARC provides the scholar with legitimization and inclusion into a community of the best aggregated, digital materials in their subject of study. When a node editorial board/community approves the inclusion of the digital resource into ARC, the appropriate node director writes a letter to the scholar detailing that their resource was not only approved by a highly lauded, period-specific editorial board, but describes how their research adds needed knowledge to the scholarly community as a whole. This letter, geared towards tenure and promotion committees, highlights equivalencies to print publications in order to call attention to the high intellectual quality of the resource. For, as stated in an article for the Journal of Digital Humanities, written by one of the authors of this paper (Laura Mandell), “a database may in fact by more like an article in terms of work and impact than like a book, it may resemble an edition more than argument, or vice versa.”
Content Review Guidelines
Technical Review Guidelines
- Does the site’s title and claims about its content and scope match your experience of viewing the site? As a researcher in this field, does the content of this site match your expectations and needs?
- Would this content be as useful in print as it is in its digital format, or does the digital format enchance the content’s value as a research tool?
- Does the content rigorously conform to the scholarly requirements for your field?
- Please formulate a few research questions and attempt to answer them using the site under review. Describe how well the site facilitated your research, as well as any problems that you had or gaps you encountered.
- Does the project clearly communicate its technological structures and methodologies?
- Does the project make use of recommended, standard technological formats?
- Does the project provide documentation for use? How useful is this documentation, both for casual users and for those interested in technical elements of the site?
- Is the project open access or proprietary? Is the source code available for any part of the site?
- Does the project work as expected? How easy is the site to use? What improvements would make the site more easily usable?
- Does the project meet basic standards for accessibility?
Advisory Boards and Content Reviewers
- John Bender (Stanford University)
- Brian Geiger (University of California, Riverside; ESTC)
- Jody Greene (University of California, Santa Cruz)
- Suvir Kaul (University of Pennsylvania)
- Jonathan Kramnick (Rutgers University)
- Deidre Lynch (University of Toronto)
- Robert Markley (University of Illinois)
- Laura McGrane (Haverford College)
- Lisa Moore (University of Texas at Austin)
- Allison Muri (University of Saskatchewan)
- Daniel O’Quinn (University of Guelph)
- Clifford Siskin (New York University)
- Charlotte Sussman (Duke University)
- Helen Thompson (Northwestern University)
- Robin Valenza (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
- William Warner (University of California, Santa Barbara)
Advisory Board
- Claire Brey (British Library)
- Matthieu Bonicel (Bibliothèque nationale de France)
- Arianna Ciula (European Science Foundation)
- Toby Burrows (University of Western Australia)
- Christoph Flüeler (Universität Freiburg)
- Martin Foys (King’s College London)
- Alex Gillespie (University of Toronto)
- Charles Henry (Council on Library and Information Resources)
- Stephen Nichols (Johns Hopkins University)
- Will Noel (University of Pennsylvania)
- Dan O’Donnell (University of Lethbridge)
Editorial Board
- Julia Craig-McFeely (University of Oxford)
- James Cummings (University of Oxford)
- Patrick Geary (Institute for Advanced Study)
- Albert Lloret (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
- Lynn Ransom (University of Pennsylvania)
- Peter Robinson (University of Saskatchewan)
- Roberto Rosselli Del Turco (Universita’ di Torino)
- Torsten Schassen (Herzog August Bibliothek)
- Stephen Shepherd (Loyola Marymount University)
- Dominique Stutzmann (Institut de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes (CNRS))
- Elaine Treharne (Stanford University)
Advisory Board
- Barbara Green (University of Notre Dame)
- Faye Hammill (University of Strathclyde)
- Mark Hussey (Pace University)
- Sean Latham (University of Tulsa)
- Pericles Lewis (Yale University)
- Stephen Ross (University of Victoria)
- Robin Schulze (University of Delaware)
Advisory Board: Technical Group
- Dean Irvine (Agile Humanities Agency and University of Ottawa)
- Clifford Wulfman (Princeton University)
- Tanya Clement (University of Texas)
- Matt Huculak (University of Victoria)
- Shawna Ross (Texas A&M)
- Alex Christie (Brock University)
- Margaret Konkol (Old Dominion University)
- Nikolaus Wasmoen (University at Buffalo)
Editorial Board
- Tim Armstrong (Royal Holloway, University of London)
- George Bornstein (University of Michigan)
- Peter Brooker (University of Sussex)
- Mark Byron (University of Sydney)
- Debra Rae Cohen (University of South Carolina)
- Melba Cuddy-Keane (University of Toronto)
- Marianne DeKoven (Rutgers University)
- Enda Duffy (University of California, Santa Barbara)
- Paul Eggert (Loyola University Chicago)
- Maud Ellmann (University of Chicago)
- Christine Froula (Northwestern University)
- Barbara Green (University of Notre Dame)
- Faye Hammill (University of Strathclyde)
- Mark Hussey (Pace University)
- George Hutchinson (Cornell University)
- Sean Latham (University of Tulsa)
- Michael Levenson (University of Virginia)
- Deborah McDowell (University of Virginia)
- Cristanne Miller (University at Buffalo)
- Michael North (University of California, Los Angeles)
- Jahan Ramazani (University of Virginia)
- Chris Reed (Penn State University)
- Stephen Ross (University of Victoria)
- Robin Schulze (University of Delaware)
- Vince Sherry (Washington University)
- Peter Shillingsburg (Loyola University Chicago)
- Andrew Thacker (Nottingham Trent University)
- Dirk van Hulle (University of Antwerp)
Americanist Board
- Stephanie Browner, Berea College
- John Bryant, Hofstra University
- Ryan Cordell, Northeastern University
- Amy Earhart, Texas A&M University
- Amanda Gailey, University of Georgia
- Sharon Harris, University of Connecticut
- Andrew Jewell, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
- Mark Kamrath, University of Central Florida
- Lauren Klein, Georgia Institute of Technology
- Joel Myerson, University of South Carolina
- Venetria Patton, Purdue University
- Timothy Powell, University of Pennsylvania
- Kenneth Price, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
- Martha Nell Smith, University of Maryland
- Haskell Springer, University of Kansas
- Eric Sundquist, University of California
- Perry Willett, University of Michigan
Romantic Board
- James Chandler, University of Chicago
- Adriana Craciun, Birkbeck, University of London
- Stuart Curran, University of Pennsylvania
- Morris Eaves, University of Rochester
- Michael Eberle-Sinatra, Université de Montréal
- Elizabeth Fay, University of Massachusetts
- Neil Fraistat, University of Maryland
- Tim Fulford, De Montfort University
- Jerrold Hogle, University of Arizona
- Anne Janowitz, Queen Mary University of London
- Steve Jones, Loyola University, Chicago
- Debbie Lee, Washington State University
- Marjorie Levinson, University of Michigan
- Alan Liu, University of California, Santa Barbara
- Laura Mandell, Texas A&M University
- Jerome McGann, University of Virginia
- Alan Richardson, Boston College
- Nicholas Roe, University of St. Andrews
- Andrew Stauffer, University of Virginia
- Jon Saklofske, Acadia University
- Ron Tetreault, Dalhousie University
- Duncan Wu, St Catherine’s College, Oxford
Victorian Board
- Amanda Anderson, Johns Hopkins University
- Nancy Armstrong, Brown University
- Laurel Brake, Birkbeck, University of London
- Susan Brown, University of Guelph, Canada
- Joseph Childers, University of California, Riverside
- Jay Clayton, Vanderbilt University
- Michael Eberle-Sinatra, Université de Montréal
- Andrew Elfenbein, University of Minnesota
- Dino Franco Felluga, Purdue University
- Hilary Fraser, Birkbeck, University of London
- Catherine Gallagher, University of California, Berkeley
- Pamela Gilbert, University of Florida
- Lauren Goodlad, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Elaine Hadley, University of Chicago
- Antony Harrison, North Carolina State University
- Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, Ryerson University
- George Landow, Brown University
- Michael Levenson, University of Virginia
- Jerome McGann, University of Virginia
- Andrew Miller, Indiana University
- Leah Price, Harvard University
- Linda Shires, Yeshiva University
- Garrett Stewart, University of Iowa
- Herbert Tucker, University of Virginia
- John Walsh, Indiana University
Editorial and Advisory Board
- Julie Herrada (Labadie Collection, University of Michigan)
- Patrice-Andre Prud’homme (Oklahoma State University)
- Arthur Versluis (Michigan State University)
Technical Reviewers
- Natalie Berkman (SAE Institute Paris)
- Elisa Beshero-Bondar (Penn State Erie, The Behrend College)
- Poonam Bharti (Infinity Research and Study, India)
- Tatiana Bryant (Barnard College)
- Grace Campagna (Fordham University)
- Audrey Canalès (Université de Montréal)
- Melinda Cohoon (University of Washington)
- Randall Cream (University of South Carolina)
- sarah madoka currie (University of Waterloo)
- Elie Dannaoui (University of Balamand)
- Emily Edwards (St. Francis College)
- Patricia Wanderley Ferreira Lopes (Institute of Andalusian Historical Heritage)
- Jennifer Golightly (Colorado College)
- Joshua Hussey (University of Georgia)
- Deepika Kashyap (University of Hyderabad)
- Kevin Kirner (University of Puget Sound)
- Stephen Klein (CUNY Graduate Center)
- Yadira Lizama-Mué (University of Western Ontario)
- Stuart M. McManus (Chinese University of Hong Kong)
- Lisa Maruca (Wayne State University)
- Aaron Mauro (Brock University)
- Eleonora Moccia (John Cabot University)
- M. Willis Monroe (University of British Columbia)
- Jasmine Mulliken (Stanford University Press)
- Rebecca Nesvet (University of Wisconsin, Green Bay)
- Dianna Niebylski (University of Illinois at Chicago)
- Mark Olsen (ARTFL/University of Chicago)
- Benjamin Pauley (Eastern Connecticut State University)
- Julia Polyck-O’Neill (York University)
- David Radcliffe (Virginia Tech)
- Victoria Rahbar (Hostos Community College, CUNY)
- Emily Rau (University of Nebraska-Lincoln)
- Amanda Regan (Clemson University)
- Norman Rusin (University of Rhode Island)
- Elena Spadini (University of Basel)
- Ashlyn Stewart (University of Nebraska-Lincoln)
- Reema Chowdhary Sukhija (Indian Institute of Technology Indore)
- Serenity Sutherland (SUNY Oswego)
- Lloyd Alimboyao Sy (University of Virginia)
- Joey Takeda (Simon Fraser University)
- Mary Borgo Ton (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)
- Lik Hang Tsui (City University of Hong Kong)
- Shu Wan (University at Buffalo)
- Haining Wang (Indiana University Bloomington)
- George Williams (University of South Carolina Upstate)
- Shiloh Williams (Brock University)
- Kathryn Wymer (North Carolina Central University)