As I'm writing this, I'm sitting in a two-day conference about digital and public humanities at Duke, where the takeaway is that Deans and the humanities as a whole need a coherent way to vet, review, and evaluate risky and adventurous work that is digital and/or public reaching in order to start the process of making it count toward career advancement. Deans, funding agencies, and department review committees request outside letters, outside letters so far are only from experts who evaluate research expertise. As a result, committees can't count things outside of the model of "research expertise" toward tenure, promotion, and raises that don't speak as meaningfully to other scholarly ventures as they do to standard research (service? are you kidding me? You have service reviews?) I couldn't have done Hi-Phi Nation as a junior faculty, and I can't do it now if I still cared about becoming "Full," whatever satisfaction that's supposed to bring me. But some of you out there do care, and also care about outreach and risky non-standard projects, and the unfairness that younger people do it only out of a labor of love (shout out to my wonderful friends at Wi-Phi) rather than as part of their career, with the risk of it actually hurting their careers.
So while I have this platform, I guess I can put a call-out to senior people in the field who would be interested in doing such vetting for the benefit of the field, and maybe we should think about how to organize such a group through the APA. You can email me and I'll keep a list and see if anything can be done with it. If this already exists, excuse my ignorance.
