It would appear digital humanities has arrived...sort of.

A telling fact previously noted: more than 40 MLA panels were dedicated to some aspect of this new field. Universities are ramping up funding for initiatives that intersect with digital humanist concerns, and none other than Stanley Fish (in his New York Times Opinionator blog) repeatedly discusses his (and other) perspectives on this subject.

Numerous writers (Fish included) are claiming digital humanities is the 'new' New Media, Postmodernism, etc...but there is one small catch: how does this emergent field's rapid ascent square against the cryptic, almost medieval process of tenure-granting? 

In a recent article on Inside Higher Ed, we find this exact topic addressed. Coming as a follow-up of sorts to a previous, post-MLA article that posited, "digital humanities have 'arrived,' for all intents and purposes — save a very important one: tenure and promotion," this article illustrates one endeavor seeking to mete a halfway between the oftentimes idiosyncratic approaches taken by digital humanists and those peer-edited mechanisms expected by tenure committees.

Called Anvil Academics, it is a joint collaboration between National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education (NITLE) and the Council for Library and Information Resources (CLIR). Anvil's goal is to make it possible for academics to publish nontraditional work under the umbrella of traditional academic publishers. 

Chuck Henry, the president of CLIR, is quoted in a statement as saying, “Increasingly, research in the humanities is dependent on large data sets and involves sophisticated algorithms and visualizations in the execution of that research and in the construction of the products of scholarship. Anvil will capture the environment in which this research is conducted: a linked ecology of scholarly expression, data, and tools of analysis that will over time become itself a place for new knowledge discovery.”

Using digital platforming, Anvil will present its users with searchable, indexed options via which to engage with digital humanist scholarship. Users will be able to read spreadsheets, filter through datasets, participate in game-like simulations, etc. Additionally (and ideally), users will also have access to the underlying data, algorithms, and media upon which the scholarly exhibits are based. In this new digital form, this work will be sharable, downloadable, and reuseable.

Beyond the hydraulics of its access and presentational format, however, the major undertaking Anvil sets for itself is to build a peer review infrastructure--something that will be capable of assessing and presenting studies that are not easily represented in text alone. There is currently no imprimatur or press handling work in the digital humanities. Additionally, creating one and its necessary infrastructure is prohibitively expensive for most individual presses. Anvil is seeking to be the first. It will construct the platforms and infrastructure, and it will partner with universities for proficient peer reviewers.

Though Anvil does not currently have official partnerships with university presses, it does have $400,000 in the bank as well as staff and financial support commitments from Stanford University, the University of Virginia, Washington University in St. Louis, Bryn Mawr College, Amherst College, Middlebury College, and Southwestern University. In addition, its board of directors is packed with prominent digital scholarship advocates such as Ed Ayers, president of the University of Richmond, and Michael Keller, the university librarian at Stanford.

Still in its developing stages, Anvil is a promising development in the entrenching of digital humanities. If successful, it will provide a peer-reviewed platform for any number of projects, and it will do so under the auspices of a collaboration formed with several major institutions.

This is not, of course, the only way digital humanities work can garner a stronger foothold in the traditional tenure game, but, if successful, it is one more step in the already-meteoric rise of digital humanities.