About

Digital Humanities Now is an experimental, edited publication that highlights and distributes informally published digital humanities scholarship and resources from the open web. Since 2009, DHNow has been refining processes of aggregation, discovery, curation, and review to open and extend conversations about the digital humanities research and practice.

DHNow highlights scholarship—in whatever form—that drives the digital humanities field forward as Editors’ Choice.

Additional items of interest to the field—jobs, calls for papers, conference and funding announcements, reports, and recently-released resources—are redistributed as news.

DHNow is also an experiment in contemporary scholarly communication practices and a critical case study for PressForward, a research project at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. Our goal is to encourage scholars to share their research and learned expertise on the open web. Specifically, we are developing methodologies and technologies to facilitate the aggregation and curation of gray literature—scholarly work including white papers, presentations, research reports, essays, and other genres of work that may not otherwise have a formal venue for publication.

How this works

DHNow aggregates potential content via RSS from our list of subscribed feeds, which includes hundreds of venues where high-quality digital humanities scholarship is likely to appear, such as the personal websites of scholars, institutional sites, blogs, and other feeds—and is open for anyone to join. We also seek to discover new material by monitoring Twitter and other social media for stories discussed by the community, and by continuously scanning the broader web through generalized and specialized search engines. Editors-at-Large also directly nominate content from their own networks.

  • The aggregated material is reviewed, nominated, and discussed directly in our WordPress installation using our own PressForward plugin. Each week volunteer Editors-at-Large use the plugin to survey the incoming content from both our subscribed feeds and their own networks and nominate content for broader dissemination through DHNow. Instructions for Editors-at-Large can be found here.
  • Next, a rotating Editor-in-Chief selects content for publication on DHNow. Our site manager then creates a brief post on DHNow, and links back to the original content in order to direct attention and conversation to the creator.
  • Editors-in-Chief are research faculty and graduate students at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. Publishing DHNow is an opportunity for us to survey the broad scope of digital humanities practice as well as to develop and implement a crowd-sourced, collaborative digital humanities project.
  • If you would like to participate in the selection process, consider becoming a volunteer Editor-at-Large.
  • Visit our Editors’ Corner to find out more about what our Editors-at-Large do, how we use the PressForward plugin, and to learn about our new user management plugin.

You can read about previous iterations of our process here:

Submit your work

If you would like your blog or feed to be considered for publication in Digital Humanities Now, please visit the Submit Your Work page.

To nominate a news item, former and current editors-at-large should use the Nominate This bookmarklet to nominate an item and its associated RSS feed. News items can also be submitted via email to dhnow @ pressforward.org.