Rethinking What Counts as Scholarship
Across universities and cultural institutions, scholars are rethinking what counts as legitimate academic work. The dominance of the peer-reviewed journal article and the monograph is slowly giving way to a more diverse ecosystem of scholarly forms: digital projects, public-facing essays, experimental media, and collaborative workflows that do not fit neatly into traditional categories.
This shift is not merely technical. It reflects a deeper desire to align scholarly practice with how knowledge is actually produced today—iteratively, collaboratively, across multiple platforms, and in dialogue with publics beyond the academy. The question is not whether to abandon traditional forms, but how to expand them, remix them, and create space for new modes of inquiry to be recognized and valued.
The Desire Behind New Scholarly Forms
The drive to experiment with new scholarly forms comes from several intersecting desires. First is the desire for accessibility: research that is locked behind paywalls or written in inaccessible language cannot serve the communities it often studies. Second is the desire for responsiveness: scholars want ways to publish that can keep pace with rapidly changing fields, technologies, and social conditions.
Third is the desire for collaboration. Many research questions now demand teams that cross disciplinary, institutional, and geographic borders. Traditional formats often struggle to acknowledge this complexity, reducing multi-voiced work to a single byline or a fixed set of author names. New forms make it possible to represent research as networks, conversations, and iterative processes instead of as solitary, finished products.
How THATCamp Sparked the Project
One influential catalyst for this rethinking was THATCamp, an unconference that brought together scholars, technologists, librarians, and students interested in the digital humanities. Unlike conventional academic conferences with rigid schedules and pre-selected papers, THATCamp emphasized open, participant-driven sessions shaped on the fly by the people in the room.
It was within this experimental, low-barrier environment that a particular project took shape—one explicitly inspired by reimagining scholarly forms. Instead of starting with a finished idea and seeking a venue, the project grew organically out of conversation: a shared recognition that the way scholarship was being produced at THATCamp did not match how it was later documented, credited, or preserved.
Participants asked: What would it mean to treat the unconference itself as a scholarly form? How could we build a framework that recognized spontaneous collaboration, rapid prototyping, and multi-modal work as legitimate, citable contributions to knowledge?
From Conversation to Call for Participation
The project’s original call for participation emerged as both invitation and provocation. It challenged contributors to imagine scholarship that could exist comfortably within a simple, human-readable structure, such as a single page at a root path like /index.html, while still carrying the weight and rigor of more conventional academic outputs.
Framing the work this way served several goals:
- Simplicity: A minimal structure reduces technical barriers and foregrounds ideas over infrastructure.
- Portability: Scholarship that can live as a self-contained page can easily be mirrored, archived, translated, and shared.
- Transparency: A clearly structured page makes process visible: contributors, methods, and iterations become legible to readers.
Instead of requesting full articles in predetermined formats, the call welcomed prototypes, annotated code, dialogues, curated datasets, and reflective essays on method. The goal was not simply to showcase finished products, but to surface the messy, generative practices that typically remain hidden behind polished publications.
Challenging the Single-Author Myth
One of the central themes of the project was a challenge to the myth of the solitary scholar. THATCamp sessions routinely blurred roles: a librarian might sketch out metadata needs; a developer might write a prototype; a historian might supply archival materials; a student might test usability and suggest new directions. Knowledge emerged from this interplay, not from a single, authoritative voice.
By recognizing such sessions as scholarly work in their own right, the project foregrounded credit and attribution as crucial design problems. How do we record fleeting contributions? How do we honor invisible labor, such as moderation, facilitation, documentation, or translation? New scholarly forms demand new credit systems—ones that are flexible, plural, and sensitive to power dynamics.
Designing Scholarship as Infrastructure
Rethinking scholarly forms is also an infrastructural project. It requires reexamining everything from file formats and version control to peer review and long-term preservation. If a scholarly project is a living conversation rather than a static artifact, then the underlying infrastructure must support:
- Versioning: The ability to cite and revisit earlier iterations while acknowledging ongoing change.
- Modularity: Components that can be reused, remixed, or extended by others.
- Openness: Accessible source materials, methods, and documentation whenever ethically possible.
In this sense, the project coming out of THATCamp did not only produce content; it also modeled a workflow. The modest figure of a single, clearly structured page becomes a symbol for a broader principle: scholarship should be easy to enter, navigate, and build upon.
Rigor Beyond the Traditional Article
Experimentation does not mean abandoning rigor. On the contrary, new scholarly forms often demand more careful reflection about evidence, method, and argument because they lack the protective familiarity of established genres. When building a project that combines narrative, data, code, and design, scholars must justify their choices at every level.
Peer review may take new shapes as well: open commentary, community vetting, iterative critique, and post-publication review can complement or, in some cases, replace closed, pre-publication assessment. The project’s orientation toward conversation rather than closure invites readers to become participants, blurring the line between audience and contributor.
Public Engagement and the Scholarly Commons
Another key dimension of these emerging forms is their relationship to public knowledge. Scholarship that is structured for the web, written in accessible language, and designed for interaction can reach far beyond academic circles. This is not a dilution of expertise but a reconfiguration of its responsibilities.
When scholars treat their work as part of a broader commons, they make different decisions about licensing, accessibility, and design. They may prioritize summaries that are comprehensible to non-specialists, or interactive components that invite localized interpretations of global problems. The scholarly page becomes a gathering place rather than a sealed container.
Lessons from THATCamp for Future Scholarship
The project that grew from THATCamp offers several enduring lessons for the future of scholarship:
- Start from practice: Observe how people are already working, collaborating, and sharing, then build forms that recognize those realities.
- Prototype quickly: Treat new formats as experiments that can be tested, revised, or retired, rather than as final solutions.
- Value documentation: Notes, code comments, session summaries, and reflective essays are themselves important scholarly contributions.
- Design for many audiences: Write and build with students, peers, community partners, and future researchers in mind.
Most importantly, the project illustrated that rethinking scholarly forms is collaborative work. It happens in conversation—in hallways, in unconference sessions, in shared documents and code repositories. The forms we build shape the questions we can ask and the communities we can form.
A Flexible Future for Academic Publishing
Looking ahead, academic publishing is likely to be characterized less by a single dominant model than by a constellation of overlapping forms. Traditional journals and books will continue to matter, but they will coexist with experimental platforms, living documents, multimedia narratives, and hybrid works that resist easy categorization.
The task for institutions, publishers, and scholarly communities is to recognize, support, and reward this plurality. Promotion and tenure guidelines, funding mechanisms, and review practices must evolve to accommodate emergent forms without sacrificing accountability and quality. The project that emerged from THATCamp is one example of how this evolution can begin: modestly, collaboratively, and grounded in the everyday realities of how scholars actually work.