Micro-credit
In the section on research, I suggested that new methods of communication have allowed a finer granularity of research, that in effect the dissemination route had an influence on what could be deemed research. This finer granularity, or shift to process away from outputs, is another difficulty for recognising digital scholarship. One approach may be to shift to awarding ‘micro-credit’ for activity – so, for example, a blog post which attracts a number of comments and links can be recognised but to a lesser degree than a fully peer-reviewed article. Finer granularity in the types of evidence produced would allow recognition of not just outputs but also the type of network behaviour which is crucial to effective digital scholarship. Smith Rumsey (2010) suggests that ‘perhaps there should be different units of micro-credit depending on the type of contribution, from curating content to sustaining the social network to editing and managing the entire communication enterprise of a collaborative scholarly blogging operation’.