The work involved in digital projects varies greatly from the traditional monograph, which can lead faculty advisors and committee members to question how they should evaluate the project. The below list of resources aims to offer some structure and guidance to this process.

Note: while this page is filed under a section for faculty advisors, the content would be useful for PhD students pursuing digital projects to peruse as well.

• The MLA has published a number of relevant reports and guidelines on the evaluation of a broad range of humanities projects. Their Guidelines for Evaluating Work in Digital Humanities and Digital Media, in Publicly Engaged Humanities Scholarship, and on Scholarly Editions are particularly useful.
• For historians, the AHA has established Guidelines for the Professional Evaluation of Digital Scholarship by Historians and has documented George Mason University’s Department of History establishing official Digital Dissertation Guidelines.
• The Journal of Digital Humanities has also published an entire issue that deals with this topic from various perspectives
• Relatedly, ACH has published general assessment guidelines aimed at tenure and promotion that are still useful in reviewing doctoral level work
• Our podcast episode with GC faculty member and frequent digital dissertation advisor Dr. Matthew K. Gold can contextualize the experience of advising digital scholarship
• Our forthcoming podcast episode with Sharon Leon (Associate Professor of History and Digital Humanities at Michigan State University) will also offer the perspective of establishing these guidelines in departments
• There have been a number of publications in this space that can be helpful to advisors. Virgina Kuhn’s open access “The Digital Monograph? Key Issues in Evaluation” and Anke Finger’s “The Gutenberg Galaxy will be Pixelated or How to Think of Digital Scholarship as The Present” chapters in Shaping the Digital Dissertation (Open Press Books, 2021) might be a good place to start
• Benoit Majerus’ open access article “Training the Trainer: Being a PhD Supervisor of a Digital Historian in the Making” is a short opinion piece on methodologies, challenges, and tools of digital history, and thoughts on collaboration and evaluation
• And, Katina Roger’s Putting the Humanities PhD to Work (Duke UP, 2020) includes a chapter called “What Faculty Advisors Can Due” that might be equally valabuable to advisors and students. Roger’s text is fully available as an ebook via the Mina Rees Library.

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