ERIC Number: EJ1004358
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2013
Pages: 0
Abstractor: ERIC
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0190-2946
EISSN: N/A
Embrace and Ambivalence
Kuhn, Virginia
Academe, v99 n1 Jan-Feb 2013
The digital dissertation has been here for almost a decade, but people in the academe still don't seem to know what to do with it. How should it be presented? How should it be archived? In August 2005, the author successfully defended a media-rich digital dissertation in the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM). The next day, she began a postdoctoral appointment at the University of Southern California. The author had negotiated the logistics of archiving her digital manuscript with the UWM graduate school, and the plans were finalized in September. Contemporary culture was already awash in digital media when she was a graduate student in the late 1990s and early 2000s, yet digital scholarship remained a marginalized scholarly mode--and still does. The author reiterates: in times of sweeping technological change, explicit articulation of how emergent technologies serve intellectual pursuits is vital. Yet the academic bias against digital scholarship remains widespread. All too frequently, official university stances that proclaim institutions to be digital--and, thus, innovative--are disconnected from actual practices. For all the talk, junior scholars often feel they are being discouraged from embarking on digital endeavors. The prominent humanities scholar Steven Nichols argues that there is an "entrenched professional prejudice against digital scholarship" and a corresponding disparity in the faculty reward system at Johns Hopkins University, where he teaches, as well as in the wider academic landscape.
Descriptors: Higher Education, Graduate Study, Faculty, Technological Advancement, Tenure, Scholarship, Influence of Technology, Technology Uses in Education
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Opinion Papers
Education Level: Higher Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A