Sean Takats

Sean Takats

Recent posts

A Digital Humanities Tenure Case, Part 2: Letters and Committees

4 minute read

After my tenure presentation and with the unanimous vote of my department, my department’s RPT committee and our chair prepared additional letters to send the file up the food chain to the college-level promotion and tenure committee. These letters were embarrassingly favorable, and based on the excerpts they included from outside readers, those letters too offered overwhelming support for tenure. The college-level committee, however, wasn’t so easily fooled. Voting 10-2 in favor of my case, largely on the basis of my monograph in French history, here’s what the committee members had to report on the digital side of my portfolio: The committee also recognized his considerable work at the Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media as it relates to...

Hello Again, 2006: The Economics of Reference Management Software

4 minute read

The tiny and insular world where academia, technology, and business converge buzzed all day yesterday (and continues to do so today) about publishing giant Elsevier’s rumored bid to purchase Mendeley for $100M. TechCrunch’s dependably credulous reporter duly transcribed the leaker’s claims that publishing is “the world that Mendeley is disrupting.” But this story has really nothing to do with a “disruption” in academic publishing, and if anything what we’re seeing is a reversion to 2006 or so. When Zotero launched then, the major players were Endnote (Thomson Reuters) and RefWorks (ProQuest), each owned by a major content provider. And now in 2013 we can add to that stable of publisher-owned reference managers Papers (Springer) and, apparently, Mendeley (Elsevier). As someone...

A Digital Humanities Tenure Case, Part 1: “The Talk”

4 minute read

Is there anything that promotes introspective hand-wringing like the heady mix of tenure, promotion, and the digital humanities? The Journal of Digital Humanities recently explored this issue, and especially interesting contributions by Mark Sample and Katherine D. Harris offer retrospective looks at the role played by the digital humanities in their happily-ending tenure cases. I’d like to go a bit further in raising the curtain on what’s unnecessarily viewed as a secretive and mysterious process, particularly when it involves digital humanities. Some of this mystery stems from the fact that there just aren’t that many people seeking tenure yet on digital grounds. But much of it is self-inflicted, because candidates are reluctant to disclose what’s happening, except perhaps after the...

Only a Historian

4 minute read

“The world needs ditch diggers too.” -Judge Smails, Caddyshack (1980) At last week’s Digital Humanities Luxembourg (DHLU) symposium, a common refrain could be heard in nearly every presentation: “I’m only a historian.” Uttered apologetically at the beginning of a number of presentations, after two days it became the object of parody and ultimately comprised part of organizer Frédéric Clavert‘s excellent concluding remarks. But despite the snickering each time it was heard, there was little investigation of what was behind this phrase. I think it actually reveals something important about the state of DH, perhaps especially in Europe but hardly exclusively so.1 A generous interpretation would be that stating one is “only a historian” apologizes for a deficit of technical content...

PressForward Joins Forces with OpenEdition

2 minute read

I’m pleased to announce a new partnership between PressForward and OpenEdition. PressForward is the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media’s project to study and produce alternative means scholarly communication. OpenEdition, led by the Centre for Open Electronic Publishing in Marseille, shares many of the same goals but on a much larger scale: it seeks to develop a sustainable digital platform for publishing scholarly content and will be supported over eight years by a 7 million euro grant funded by the French Higher Education and Research Ministry. Our role at RRCHNM will be to develop and support PressForward’s multilingual integration into OpenEditions’s overall platform. The partnership is being funded by the French Agence nationale de la Recherche’s Equipex program,...