The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (CHNM) has been presenting history in innovative and boundary-breaking ways since its inception in 1994. But one of the center’s latest projects could deliver a whole new stream of information.
In late 2011, the center launched the first issue of the Journal of Digital Humanities, a peer-reviewed, open access journal that features digital humanities material and scholarship selected from across the Internet. The journal will be published on a quarterly basis.
Dan Cohen, director of CHNM and editor of the journal, said that it features the best material in the digital humanities field, in forms ranging from the traditional, such as articles and reviews, to the non-traditional, such as digital galleries, software and interactive maps. There is no traditional submission process. The journal’s editors and online community select 15 items to publish from a list of about 15,000 submissions to Digital Humanities Now, an online showcase of scholarship and digital humanities news that is collected and vetted by a dedicated, online community-driven editorial system.
This review process ensures the quality of the pieces selected for inclusion in the journal.
“We wish to feature the full breadth of work in the area of digital humanities, including standard narrative writing of various lengths, code, software, digital tools, research methods, audio, video, podcasts and interactive websites,” Cohen said. “Work submitted to a journal is usually writing, but we wanted to include formats that traditionally cannot be condensed into a journal.”
The field of digital humanities, known for its untraditional approach to scholarship, faces some skepticism from a portion of the academic community used to conventional research methods. The new journal tackles some of these tensions.
“Part of the issue is that we’re still trying to address the inertia in academica, more than 20 years into the web,” Cohen said. “Now, we have experts who can analyze what good work is, and we are trying to publish that good work. We are ensuring standards of quality but allowing for experimentation.”
Each quarter, the journal will be made available online, at http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org. So far, 40,000 subscribers have signed up to receive the publication, which is free to read and download.
Cohen and the other editors keep a detailed compendium of sources to find new work to feature.
“We know that there are people beyond our immediate community,” he said. “We are trying to take the most expansive vision of what digital humanities might be, and we are trying to find that content wherever it might be.”
The second issue of the Journal of Digital Humanities was released on June 28, 2012.