Checklist

A few things that you need to understand about digital scholarship before starting work on a project.

The purpose of digital scholarship

• The purpose of studying digital humanities is not to create better digital scholarship: it is to create better technology-independent scholarship.

Digital scholarship in the scholarly community

• Scholarly work is licensed for scholarly reuse.
• Make your computational environment replicable.

Practical management and architecture

• Scholarly work is version controlled. Track changes and know what version of material you're talking about.
• User interfaces are ephemeral; services have lengthier lives, but simple archival data formats are the key to long-term preservation.

Argument and demonstration

• Every assertion must have an accompanying test.
• Scholarly citation of evidence is declarative, not procedural: don't confuse retrieval and search.
• Cite evidence with identifiers, not labels.

Digital reading and editing

• Editing and reading texts are different interpretive activities. Don't complicate your edition with analytical markup.