The Reboot of Digital Humanities Now
Discover the latest work from across the field and around the world
by Dan Cohen
In 2009, I founded Digital Humanities Now as an easy way to track what was going on in this emerging field and to highlight the best and most-discussed work and news. As I summarized the conception of DHNow in the introduction on my blog, the goal was to provide everyone from newcomers to longtime practitioners with items of interest from all corners of the internet and around the globe—and not just within academic disciplines, but from libraries, archives, and museums, among independent scholars, and in the humanistic areas of software development. DHNow sought to avoid the constraints of an academic journal, with its handful of peer-reviewed articles issued every few months, and, conversely, the lack of constraints in social media, with its endless stream of views and links. Something helpful, instead, in the middle: a frequent, curated set of new ideas, projects, and techniques.
Being digital humanities, much of this work was found through blogs and newsletters, personal and institutional websites, code repositories, forums, and other online locations. After using some automation early on, I soon shared the operation of DHNow with my colleagues at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, and eventually we expanded the circle further to a larger, rotating set of editors beyond RRCHNM. On the back end, DHNow also evolved from my hacked-together system into the robust platform PressForward, which launched in 2011 and now supports a number of outlets that cover a variety of fields. DHNow had a good initial run of over a decade thanks to RRCHNM, but eventually went dormant during the Covid pandemic.
With the generous support of Digital Scholar, which stewards PressForward and other open source software projects like Zotero and Omeka, the Northeastern University Library is relaunching Digital Humanities Now within our Centers for Digital Scholarship, a collaborative space for projects and initiatives that share the approaches found in DHNow. From the announcement:
We are delighted to announce the reboot of Digital Humanities Now to showcase important digital humanities scholarship and news of interest to the DH community. The new version of DHNow has two methods of distribution—an RSS feed and a weekly newsletter. Please subscribe to one or both modes of distribution!
Since its launch in 2009, DHNow has been refining processes of review and aggregation to support conversations about digital humanities research and practice. Our goal is to encourage scholars to share their research and learned expertise on the open web. We are developing approaches to surface important 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.
DHNow’s Editors’ Choice items showcase scholarship—in whatever form—that drives the digital humanities field forward. Additional items of interest to the field—jobs, calls for papers, conference and funding announcements, reports, and recently released resources—are highlighted as news. Editors’ Choice items are selected weekly by our Guest Editors from our nearly 200 feeds and sources. News items can be nominated by anyone via our news submission form.
Interested in participating in DHNow? Consider becoming a Guest Editor!
To see all the work we consider, check out our list of subscribed feeds.
Do you know of a feed or a resource that should be on our radar? Nominate a feed or source.
Colleen Nugent McLean is the Project Manager of Digital Humanities Now, and I am co-directing with Julia Flanders, the director of our Digital Scholarship Group. The inviting new website design is by Nelson Amaya. Sharon Leon has provided essential advice and support throughout.
Already some great new pieces and projects are being highlighted by DHNow, including an essay on large language models as cultural technologies, machine learning on historical maps, and a digital analysis of a novel by Américo Paredes. You can also browse older issues of DHNow to learn about everything from reconstructing destroyed architecture through digital modeling to understanding the patterns behind clouds, landscapes, and contours.
Head on over to Digital Humanities Now to subscribe!