[Please add you signature to this letter to Princeton University's Dean of Faculty and the Committee on Conference and Appeals]

Dear Committee on Conference and Appeals,

We are writing as the leadership and members of the Slavic Digital Humanities Affiliate Group of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), to express our concern and dismay at the process of evaluating Prof. Katherine Hill Reischl’s tenure case, particularly with regard to her digital humanities work.

Since 2016, the ASEEES Slavic DH affiliate has served as a recognized organizational structure within the major professional organization of our field, bringing together practitioners of a kind of scholarship that has been undertaken in Slavic Studies for over 20 years. Despite the rhetoric of novelty commonly associated with digital humanities, the span of two decades has been more than sufficient for it to become well established as an interdisciplinary scholarly community, with a prestigious annual international conference, dedicated sources of grants from public and private humanities funding agencies, and ongoing commitments to institutional investment in scholarly infrastructure, such as the Princeton’s internationally-recognized Center for Digital Humanities (CDH), led by Meredith Martin and Natalia Ermolaev. Were digital humanities an unusual undertaking or an emerging scholarly field, its marginalization within Dr. Reischl’s tenure case would be justifiable. However, there is a long track record of Slavic scholars doing digital humanities work. There are tenured Slavic DH scholars both in the US and internationally who could serve as reviewers. Moreover, there are guidelines for evaluating digital scholarship developed by relevant professional organizations since 2000 (e.g. see MLA’s Guidelines for Evaluating Work in Digital Humanities and Digital Media, first published in 2000 and revised in 2012). In light of this, the failure to account for or appropriately evaluate Dr. Reischl’s digital humanities work as part of her tenure dossier calls into question the fairness of the procedure, the appropriateness of the criteria that were instead used to evaluate her work, and the reasonableness of the decision.

Dr. Reischl’s digital work on Soviet children’s literature has served as a compelling example of a project that combines deep scholarly expertise and intellectual labor with a robust, sustainable technical platform, resulting in a valuable resource for both research and pedagogy. Furthermore, her role within the US-based Slavic DH community cannot be understated. As founder and co-chair of the Slavic DH working group at Princeton, Dr. Reischl has promoted Princeton’s efforts in internationalization by forging collaboration with the Herder Institute in Marburg, Germany, leading to a series of workshops both in Germany and at Princeton that had a significant impact not only on Dr. Resichl’s own students but also the broader Slavic DH community, through offering intensive technical training combined with nuanced discussions about how and where to meaningfully apply these methods to Slavic research questions to yield insight rather than a diversion.

Based on the information Dr. Reischl received, it appears that this work passed unrecognized as part of her tenure evaluation, which flies in the face of the MLA’s Guidelines for Evaluating Work in Digital Humanities and Digital Media and similar statements that are increasingly part of the core outreach and advocacy work of scholarly societies in the year 2020. The letters offered by the leadership of Princeton’s CDH, as well as collaborators from the Herder Institute, appear to have not been transmitted to the Committee for their consideration when making the decision. None of the letter writers solicited by the Committee appear to have engaged with her digital work, raising questions about whether anyone was secured for this role who would have been qualified to do so.

As an organization representing Slavists who engage with digital research methodologies, we feel that this oversight in selecting the solicited letter writers led to a situation of fundamental procedural unfairness, as these evaluators would not be able to appropriately identify nor adjudicate Dr. Reischl’s work in accordance with the longstanding guidelines for recognizing digital work. With her considerable and significant digital work effectively erased from consideration, the Committee’s decision on Dr. Resichl’s tenure dossier is less stunning, but we believe that this decision, which emerged from an unfair process using inappropriate evaluation criteria, is fundamentally unreasonable. As such, we ask the Committee to accept Dr. Reischl’s appeal and put into place safeguards to ensure that future tenure cases for scholars who make good use of Princeton’s investment in digital scholarship support can have that work appropriately recognized and evaluated.

Respectfully,