First, your argument is a straw man: you wouldn’t get points toward tenure 30 years ago for building a slide rule, but you certainly would for building a lexicon or creating a new method for analyzing texts. In our day, these kinds of work are as likely to be manifest in software as not. We’re not talking about purely technical tasks like building web pages.

Second, this kind of attitude is poisonous toward any sort of Digital Humanities. Developing the tools to work in innovative ways with our sources takes time and intellectual effort. If that time and effort were counted as worthless, then nobody would ever get tenure for working on DH projects. But they do.

Third, and finally, beyond a certain level of sophistication, the creation of software to process source materials is an editorial act, in that the software will make decisions programmed into it by its creators. Understanding and being able to evaluate those decisions is vital if the outputs themselves are to be correctly evaluated. Unless the software is published and peer reviewed, how can this happen? I fear the answer is that it won’t, and the biases and assumptions of the software builders will be accepted without question.

Then again, convincing the academic bureaucracy that a particular publication is acceptable peer review is another thing all together. It looks like DHQ might be just the ticket.