Computation and software analysis have entered nearly every field of scholarship in recent years. From digital publication and mapping of relevant geo-referenced data to 3D modelling, in each case there is some sign in the computer code of the scholarly thought that underlies the project, of the intellectual argument around which the outcome is based.

The fact that scholarly software includes scholarly content is broadly accepted. What remains controversial is how identify what scholarly contribution has been made by a piece of software. Its makers tend to express the scholarship in writing separate from the software itself while its users treat the software as opaque to scrutiny and therefore deny that there is any scholarship inherent to the source code. Given that our mechanisms for identifying and evaluating the scholarship within computer code are nearly non-existent, we must ask how can scholarship come to be expressed in digital humanities software? How does this scholarship, so evident in theory but so elusive in practice, fit into the scientific process of advancement of knowledge?

Related to the question of the expression of scholarship in software, and in other forms of digital publication as well, is the question of how to evaluate it. This topic will be the focus of a half-day roundtable, Peer Review for Digital Scholarly Work, to be held on January 30th 2015. At present, researchers doing digital scholarly work are usually unable to obtain academic credit for their work—in order to obtain scholarly recognition, they must additionally publish a conventional article in a print-based journal about their digital work. The roundtable will assess whether this can change, and if so, how.

This will be part of the Scholarship in Software, Software as Scholarship: From Genesis to Peer Review event, which will take place on January 29th-30th 2015, at the University of Bern. There will also be a workshop, discussing the contributions to academia that software can make and how best it can be identified and evaluated. Titled 'Expressions', it will be a full day event taking place on January 29th 2015.

Both the workshop and the roundtable are now open for submissions. Submissions from early-career researchers and “alt-ac” practitioners within the digital humanities are particularly welcome. There are a number of travel bursaries available for speakers. If you would like to be considered for a bursary, please inform us when you submit your abstract.

For the workshop, please submit a 500 word abstract of the work you will present. For the round table, please submit a 200-word position paper indicating your intended contribution to the discussion.​ In either case, send your submission to Thomas Leibundgut by October 11th 2014 and contributors will be notified of the final decision by October 23rd. Selected papers arising from the event will also appear in an issue of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, to appear in early 2016.​