I titled this “obligatory” because the issue of convincing departments, administrators, hiring committees, and tenure and promotion boards of the value of digitally enabled scholarship and teaching has been coming up since the very first THATCamp in 2008 (and most of the hundreds since then).  The advantage of the question coming up that often is that lots of people have had chances to talk about it and even formulate some responses. [The AHA itself released its Guidelines for the Professional Evaluation of Digital Scholarship by Historians just this year.]  And yet, each situation, each school, each project, each individual’s work is different, so it continues to be a topic worth discussing.

So, I propose a session where we discuss people’s concerns in this area, talk about strategies others have used in the past, and talk about the ways that the AHA’s new guidelines provide some structure for the profession going forward.