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In reviewing an earlier draft of this article, Dickie Selfe raised an important point: in using existing criteria and traditional categories to evaluate computer-related work, evaluation will be based on the values of the traditional, print-based system. Even when we try to move gradually from valuing computer-related work in terms of traditional and print analogues, to somehow valuing it in terms of the particular qualities of the activities that computers make possible, we will still have the older value system to contend with. I think that the best we can do in creating new criteria to evaluate new kinds of work is to be aware of the presence of the older system, to imitate its strengths, avoid its weaknesses, and do our best not to succumb to the easy analogies between new work and old -- at least not without trying to evaluate the new work and its strengths in themselves. In a posting to a discussion on Rhetnet-L (June 8-30, 1995; the text of the whole discussion can be found here), Eric Crump has very clearly articulated the relationship between quality and evaluation in computer-related work in English studies. He discusses the need for the Computers and Writing community and, by extension, all of us who use computers in our research and teaching, to arrive at standards and criteria for what we consider valuable in what we do, and what we consider worth evaluating for the purposes of tenure and promotion. Until we who use computers arrive at our own standards for evaluating what we do, we will be judged by outside standards -- standards that are likely to be inadequate.
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E-mail: seth@bradley.bradley.edu
Last revised February 3, 1997