While digital scholarship in Digital Humanities (DH) is still evolving, it has become increasingly established over the past decades, a shift that is particularly evident in the emergence and proliferation of new academic journals centered around digital scholarship in both their design and thematic focus. This panel brings together four such journals — Programming Historian ( http://programminghistorian.org), archipelagos ( https://archipelagosjournal.org), The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy ( https://cuny.manifoldapp.org/journals/jitp), and Startwords ( https://startwords.cdh.princeton.edu)— that span the wide range of digital scholarship and pedagogy, and have been transformative for DH scholars publishing on these topics. Moving beyond either the “fields of dreams” (that is the assumption that if we build it they will come) or the “one-size-fits all” approaches, this panel aims to foreground the diversity and difficulties of digital scholarship, especially beyond traditional academic structures like established universities or presses.
In bringing together editors from these publications, this panel will highlight their experiences, not only with creating technical infrastructures and editorial processes, but also developing innovative strategies that prioritize each journals’ respective mission and identity. For instance, though historian is in the name, the Programming Historian publishes methods applicable to many humanities disciplines, whereas archipelagos predominantly centers on scholarship related to the Caribbean. Though these journals share some core infrastructural commitments around minimal computing, their distinct focuses necessitate unique publishing priorities to effectively serve their communities. Relatedly, while all of these journals aim to support non-traditional contributions, both The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy and Startwords have exemplified alternative paths to achieving these goals, respectively focusing on supporting early-career scholars or novel publication types like works-in-progress or datasets. Such choices may seem obvious or straightforward from the outset, but in actuality, ensuring that a digital scholarship mission is embodied in a digital scholarship journal involves a myriad of challenges and nuanced considerations.
This panel reveals how decisions around multilingual publishing infrastructures or adopting ready-to-publish platforms involve careful considerations about their impact on editorial workflows and the broader mission of each journal. Far from viewing these obstacles as setbacks though, this discussion will instead illustrate how they have been instrumental in operationalizing and refining the missions and ethos of these journals. It will demonstrate how challenges have been transformed into opportunities for innovative, ethical, and sustainable digital scholarship, with a deep respect for the labor and contributions of colleagues. Yet, as the field continues to navigate shifting technological and academic landscapes, these journals face new challenges to their commitment to inclusivity and diversity in digital scholarship. Ultimately, this panel explores the dynamic evolution and impact of mission-driven digital scholarship journals, helping make visible how these journals have developed strategies to ensure that our support and creation of digital scholarship aligns with our values and goals – a mission crucial to the future of DH.
Programming Infrastructure and Mission: The Data-Driven Rebuilding of
Programming Historian
Founded in 2008 and relaunched in 2012, Programming Historian (PH) is an open-access, open-peer review journal publishing humanities approaches to computation in four languages. Today, it increasingly publishes articles that include not just code, but also novel computational objects like fine-tuned models, all of which present unique challenges. For instance, our static site infrastructure, built and maintained by the editors, is reaching its limits given the complexity of navigating across four journals and archived materials. At the same time, as the team expands to include more editors and staff to support the journals, new members face significant challenges in learning or adapting this infrastructure (Lincoln et al., 2022) while grappling with the nuanced task of editing lessons. Consequently, the future of PH increasingly necessitates a new technical and editorial infrastructure to ensure that the journal not only supports its current audiences, but can continue expanding in the future. In this presentation, we share how we are undertaking this process, and specifically how, given that PH has been published on GitHub since 2012, we are able to use the platform’s API to collate and curate data to inform this rebuilding. Such digital trace data (Keusch & Kreuter, 2021) is helping us move beyond anecdotal evidence towards understanding in aggregate how workflows first designed for smaller teams have evolved over time, and to identify points for workflow improvement to sustain the mission and ethos of PH for the next decade (Crymble, 2016; Sichani et al., 2019; Crymble & Afanador-Llach, 2021; Isasi et al., 2023).
archipelagos’ Vision: Cultivating Innovation and Inclusivity for the Future of Caribbean Digital Humanities
We are already beginning the groundwork for our 9th issue of archipelagos , based on the proceedings of our 10th annual TCD conference, just held at Yale University. The journal and the conference were designed to be our main instruments in nurturing and growing the sub-field of Caribbean Digital Humanities. In this talk, we will share the role that such instruments have played in successfully doing what we set out to do. We will share details on the history of the design of the journal, and how it aligned with our strategic vision. We begin our presentation with a history of the socio-technical gambits that we proposed to the National Endowment for the Humanities a decade ago, on our first grant proposal for the journal. We will connect our technical gambit to our larger strategic goals of nurturing an inclusive field that transcends nations, languages and infrastructural environments. We elaborate on our editorial policies, and connect to our strategic goals. The journal has always been divided into three sections that serve to address long-term systemic challenges in rewarding and incorporating digital humanities work at the institutional level, while creating a space for work outside of formal academic spaces. We will also address how this work can be carried out in a multilingual and cross-generational ecosystem that is constantly seeking to lift up students. We will conclude with our vision for the next decade, and passing on the baton to the next generation of Caribbean Digital Humanities leaders.
#citepedagogy to Pedagogy-driven Publishing
For scholars working on pedagogy, students are at the center of what we do. They are the subjects of our work and the beneficiaries of our teaching. All the same, most students' experience of the academic publishing process is one of intense anxiety, as they struggle to match their own urgent professional development needs to a slow and opaque process that they are by and large excluded from. Founded in 2012, The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy has long aimed to act not only as a transformative venue for pedagogy scholarship, but also as a vehicle for professional development. Kane et al. have previously argued for JITP's publishing process as a form of feminist activism (2023). This talk will argue that this publishing process is also itself pedagogical in that it addresses the unique needs of students and early-career scholars. I discuss three ways JITP advocates for this community in its publishing process as well as the challenges to doing so. The journal's editorial workflow prioritizes rapid publication timelines twice a year with alternating general and themed calls. The editorial collective's governance structure maintains a quota for student membership. And the journal's variety of publication genres helps students find ways to turn otherwise invisible teaching labor into professionally legible material. Matthew Gold has argued that we need to #citepedagogy if it is to become core to DH (2019). This talk argues we should center pedagogy in the way we operate our publishing platforms as well.
Embarking on Process-Based Publications: Insights into Startwords' Journey
Digital humanities projects have many different types of outputs: datasets, documentation, curricula, articles, charters, visualizations, research software, and more. Often, the boundary between these outputs is blurry and it can be difficult to know when — or where — to hit "publish" on any one of them. In order to create a space for in-process ideas that don't quite fit into any one bucket, the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton publishes Startwords : a research periodical for experimental research in the humanities. Since October 2020, the irregularly-published journal has showcased experimental, computational, and data-driven research in the humanities, shared through an essayistic writing style that is approachable to a general readership. The custom code for the website — built using the static site generator Hugo — is available under an open-source license on GitHub. The platform includes a range of capabilities like embedded 3D objects, high-definition IIIF images, articles generated in multiple formats (HTML, PDF, TXT), custom designs for pull quotes, multilingual support, executable code snippets, and a unique solution to viewing endnotes in-line with body text that we call contextual notes. In this talk, we reflect on the process of publishing the journal alongside other outputs at the Princeton CDH. We describe the evolution of Startwords , which began from a desire to share editorials and project essays in process, and offer reflections that might be helpful for similar projects in the future.