Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 27, No. 933.
Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London
www.digitalhumanities.org/humanist
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Date: Mon, 31 Mar 2014 23:55:09 +0000
From: "Flanders, Julia"
Subject: New publishing model for Digital Humanities Quarterly

Dear all,

DHQ is pleased to announce an experimental new publication initiative that may be of interest to members of the DH community. As of April 1, we will no longer publish scholarly articles in verbal form. Instead, articles will be processed through Voyant Tools and summarized as a set of visualizations which will be published as a surrogate for the article. The full text of the article will be archived and will be made available to researchers upon request, with a cooling-off period of 8 weeks. Working with a combination of word clouds, word frequency charts, topic modeling, and citation networks, readers will be able to gain an essential understanding of the content and significance of the article without having to read it in full. The results are now visible at DHQ's site here:

http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/

We're excited about this initiative on several counts. First, it helps address a growing problem of inequity between scholars who have time to read and those whose jobs are more technical or managerial and don't allow time to keep up with the growing literature in DH. By removing the full text of the article from view and providing a surrogate that can be easily scanned in a few minutes, we hope to rectify this imbalance, putting everyone on an equal footing. A second, related problem has to do with the radical insufficiency of reading cycles compared with the demand for reading and citation to drive journal impact factor. To the extent that readers are tempted to devote significant time to individual articles, they thereby neglect other (possibly equally deserving) articles and the rewards of scholarly attention are distributed unevenly, based on arbitrary factors such as position within the journal's table of contents. DHQ's reading interface will resort articles randomly at each new page view, and will display each article to a given reader for no more than 5 minutes, enforcing a more equitable distribution of scarce attention cycles.

This initiative also addresses a deeper problem. At DHQ we no longer feel it is ethical to publish long-form articles under the pretense that anyone actually reads them. At the same time, it is clear that scholars feel a deep, almost primitive need to write in these modes and require a healthy outlet for these urges. As an online journal, we don't face any physical restrictions that would normally limit articles to a manageable size, and informal attempts to meter authors by the word (for instance, by making words over a strict count limit only intermittently visible, or blocking them with advertising) have proven ineffectual. Despite hopes that Twitter and other short-form media would diminish the popularity of long-form sustained arguments, submissions of long-form articles remain at high levels. We hope that this new approach will balance the needs of both authors and readers, and create a more healthy environment for scholarship.

Thanks for your support of DHQ and happy April 1!

best wishes, Julia


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What are some personal mythologies linked to particular places?

What are some of the dangers (think post-structuralism) of a re-enchantment of the world? How might they be avoided?

final question:

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_oGM2o2y0Y

You can post a blog entry by using the "Topic" button.

What is DH? 01-13-14


- tools: new perspectives on different disciplines & on objects of study (texts), but also self-reflection on what tools do, what it means to use that tool

eg surveillance for collective data: privacy concerns?
Text mining: added efficiency; but is that enough? Will we be replace by machines?
Text encoding (TEI, DTDs, OHCO)
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Multimodal platform for knowledge exchange: audio-visual, haptic: a means of reviving the past
- Missionary zeal to introduce others to DH

- Building stuff: learning to code??? Less yak, more hack

- More yak about theoretical issues from the (non-digital) humanities

- Efficiency is really about openness and accessibility, which creates collaboration and community; reading collaboratively, sharing, open access

Eg. Day of DH
Non-hierarchical relations between disciplines
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- Giving credit where due: Eg. CCA

- Praising failure: failure is good, and leads to new experiments: today's failure is tomorrow's success, comrades! Projects that fail in interesting ways are cool. What are the reasons for failure? Eg. hacking; broken code; difficult interface; eg. Lost Ottawa vs Heritage Crowd

- Conventional vs digital humanities: hiring; tenure; funding; publishing;

Will DH change the tradition of H, or not?
Do DHers have an ethical responsibility to change humanities: copyright, etc. ? Or are we just an effect of cultural and social changes?
To whom or what are we responsible?
Information should be shared, not commodified
- But what about social control? Who decides what will be remembered? And can we use social media to write history more accurately and fairly?

Drucker: capta vs data

A book crowdsourced in one week, May 21-28, 2010