The Great Digital Humanities Disconnect: The Failure of DH Publishing (2023)

Abstract: In this paper, we discuss the disconnect in interdisciplinary publishing from a disciplinary divide perspective as to how research is expected to be presented and published according to disciplinary conventions. We argue that this divide hinders interdisciplinary collaboration and even more so the dissemination of research results from interdisciplinary projects to other interdisciplinary researchers. The disconnect is not simply theoretical but also encompasses practical considerations such as manuscript creation standards. The disconnect can also be detrimental to academic careers in terms of evaluations by peers on funding and tenure committees as well as peer reviews. With this analysis, we want to foster further discussion about the state of academic publishing from a digital humanities perspective.

## introduction different academic disciplines have different cultures and traditions, notably different standards and expectations for what constitutes acceptable research within the discipline, but also how this research is to be presented and published. this, in turn, defines what constitutes a good "track record" for researchers, which determines their career prospects (hiring, tenure, and promotion) in this discipline. in fact, the definition and assurance of quality standards could be said to be the main purpose of disciplines, their raison d'être. these standards are enforced through institutions that are able to make decisions about funding, hiring, teaching, etc. on this level, all disciplines are effectively in competition, and cultures and traditions thus also have important social roles that may have little to do with the actual quality of research and more with staking out claims in order to influence the allocation of resources (see, e.g., @xcite . although the cultures and traditions of established disciplines can be arcane and difficult to navigate (absorbing the discipline's culture is an important, though mostly implicit, part of the training in a discipline), the expectations are-in principleknown or at least knowable. however, the picture changes radically when we consider interdisciplinary research, and even more so if the work is not just a clearly delimited collaboration of researchers from two or more disciplines, but literally "between" disciplines, i.e., in a kind of academic no man's land that is not ruled by any discipline. in both cases, researchers are confronted with and need to be aware of the publishing conventions of different disciplines if they want to benefit from their work: they need to ensure that it is visible in the right community, and that is cited or otherwise acknowledged, e.g., for obtaining tenure. the phenomenon is well known as "publish or perish" @xcite . interdisciplinary researchers are also confronted with practical issues when considering publication venues. when language technology researchers on reddit foot_0 were asked the question: "would you submit a paper to a venue that did not allow la-tex/demanded .doc?" specifying the focus as interdisciplinary research (askja, 2023) one scholar commented: it depends on the "weight" of the journal. if that's a journal where i'd plan to do some research work explicitly targeting that journal, then requiring .doc would be inconvenient but not that important. but if that is research work which i'd do and then, when it's mostly done, see what's the best place for it -then by the time i'd consider that journal, the content would be already mostly written in latex and then i'd be hesitant to rewrite it in word. the comment echoes two challenges for the dissemination of interdisciplinary research. the question of where to submit one's work seems obvious and largely unavoidable in interdisciplinary research. the choice of the writing tool, however, seems to be merely a practical question; yet in the case of digital humanities as a field between computing and the humanities, it tends to be a question that goes far beyond personal preferences or technical merits. the question of l a t e x vs. microsoft word can be considered a "fault line" in digital humanities, which aligns with numerous other divisions inside the supposed "big tent." this seems in fact to be the case-otherwise, why highlight the fact that the computational humanities research conference, foot_1 established in 2019 by a group of scholars who do computationally oriented work in dh, has adopted "practices that align with norms in computer science and linguistics (e.g., submission of 6-or 12-page papers, exclusive use of latex)" (dombrowski, 2023, 138) for their conference? in this position paper, we will explore the disconnect between these two flavors of dh from a research dissemination perspective. in addition to discussing the difficulties in interdisciplinary research and how the lack of disciplinary coherence reflects on the evaluation of research outputs, we focus on some practical issues within the publication disconnect: what open science means for the different disciplines involved including "publish or perish", the authorship and readership of different publication venues, document processing, and fi-nally what the impact will be for digital humanities as a field going forward. ## disciplinary backgrounds as most publication venues are associated with a specific discipline, the work to be published will be evaluated according to the standards of this discipline, both with respect to the research and the formal requirements concerning its presentation. but as interdisciplinary work is not, or at least not entirely, within a single discipline, this raises significant problems for the evaluation of the work-what constitutes appropriate peer review for interdisciplinary research and who is qualified to judge it? @xcite -and it has been shown that interdisciplinary research has consistently lower funding success @xcite . additionally, the lack of disciplinary conventions means that it can in practice be difficult to find reviewers with appropriate disciplinary knowledge of all the fields involved, which can lead to interdisciplinary research being unfairly evaluated from the perspective of only one of the involved fields, and the difficulty in recruiting appropriate reviewers can often delay the publication process further. in traditional humanities disciplines, the main research output is journal papers of 15-25 pages (or even longer), edited volumes, and books. it takes a long time to write such manuscripts and it can take years from submission to publication. typically, there is no document template for submission or publication; instead, there are extensive lists of margin sizes, comma use, capitalization rules, bibliographic guides, and many more submission guidelines. the submission is in the form of a .doc(x) file. conferences in the humanities are primarily networking events, where scholars present work in progress. these conferences tend to only have abstract submissions (a typical limit is 500 words), which may or may not be published in a book of abstracts. in language technology, natural language processing (nlp), and computational humanities, the prestige of publication venues is often reversed, with conference proceedings being the main and most prestigious venue for disseminating information; publication in journals is generally considered too slow and low-impact. there are often two categories of conference papers: short papers (4 to 6 pages) and long papers (8 to 12 pages). the papers are indexed and double-blind peerreviewed. the delay between submission and publication is usually between 3 to 6 months, depending on the specific venue. in these more computational disciplines, l a t e x is overwhelmingly used for submissions-these days, a direct link to a collaborative template on overleaf foot_2 is even typically provided. nevertheless, word templates are often also available. preprints are strongly encouraged and sometimes required in computational fields, further speeding up the information dissemination process. as an example, arxiv, the main preprint service for computer science and other stem fields received 20,170 submissions in october 2023. another study found that of arxiv preprint papers submitted in 2017-2018 77% were later published in peer-reviewed venues @xcite . however, preprints in the humanities are mostly frowned upon @xcite and if not outright forbidden it is common that referencing preprints is discouraged in humanities journals with only 45% of humanities journals allowing preprints and nearly all computer science journals allowing them @xcite . digital scholarship in the humanities and digital humanities quarterly could be considered two of the main journals within dh. however, the articles published in them lean heavily towards digitization (roughly 80%) rather than computational humanities, and much of the actual computational content is limited to stylometrics @xcite . digitization, especially of cultural heritage, is certainly a part of digital humanities, but the imbalance is striking. where are the computational humanities papers published, if not in these journals? are we perhaps after all not all in the same "big tent" despite disciplinary gaps? ## the disconnect we argue that there is a growing theoretical and practical disconnect in dh due to widespread hostility towards certain types of computational approaches and other customs from computational fields. as a result, current dh can to a large extent be characterized as pseudo-interdisciplinary: it is in fact largely dominated by traditional humanities practices, in particular with respect to publishing, which, whether consciously or subconsciously, tend to exclude interdisciplinary researchers from fields such as computer science, computational linguistics, and even computational humanities. ## concluding remarks this position paper is a call to action. we believe that there is no future for dh if this disconnect is not addressed. instead of waiting for the "big tent" to collapse-to the detriment of everybody who is in it-we should work to establish computational humanities as a discipline in its own right, that sets its own standards and evaluation criteria. in the end, this will be the only way to ensure adequate recognition of computational research in the humanities. this does not have to mean the collapse of digital humanities, but instead a strengthening of the position of digital humanities as a field separate from traditional humanities with appropriately adjusted evaluation criteria and mutually agreed upon publication practices that are neither cumbersome nor slow to use or publish.