
HISTORY
DHNow was founded and launched by Dan Cohen in 2009, with the goal of providing the digital humanities community with a way of discovering and following the myriad forms of digital scholarship—blogs, projects, conference papers, social media feeds, reports, standards work—that were not represented in conventional scholarly publication formats.
We originally relied almost entirely on an automated process to find what digital humanities scholars were talking about and linking to. Starting in June 2013, we debuted a program of volunteer Guest Editors, who use the innovative PressForward plugin to aggregate, nominate, and review content 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. PressForward was launched in 2011 at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media with funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. DHNow became a research project at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, providing opportunities for graduate students to become involved in the digital humanities. Since 2021, PressForward has been a project of Digital Scholar, a nonprofit corporation that is responsible for the operation of Omeka, Sourcery, Tropy, Zotero, and PressForward.
In 2021, DHNow went on a hiatus. In 2024, Digital Scholar generously decided to fund the relaunch of DHNow. In 2025, DHNow was relaunched and moved to Northeastern University’s Centers for Digital Scholarship. The new iteration continues the original tradition of collaborative editing and community sourcing, while simplifying the editorial process and giving guest editors a stronger sense of voice and continuity, and expanding the geographical scope of coverage.
You can read about previous iterations in more detail here:
- Introducing Digital Humanities Now – November 2009
- Digital Humanities Now 2.0: Bigger and Better, with a New Review Process – November 2011
- Six Month Review of DHNow 2.0 – May 2012
- Sixteen Month Review of DHNow 2.0 – February 2013
- Four Year Review of DHNow – November 2013
- 2015 Year in Review – December 2015
- 2016 Year in Review – December 2016
- 2017 Year in Review – December 2017