As promised during the summer of 2024, Digital Humanities Now has finally returned after a long hiatus. Once a key anchor in the digital humanities community, DHNow, with underwriting from Digital Scholar, hopes once again to provide a gathering place for engagement about contemporary digital scholarship and up-to-date news about the field. Now housed in the Centers for Digital Scholarship at the Northeastern University Library, DHNow has been in a soft-launch mode since the beginning of the summer. As we round the corner into the Fall, the editorial workflows will ramp up to regularly surface important digital humanities scholarship and news.
Digital Scholar has supported the effort to revive the project because we firmly believe that building and sustaining a vibrant digital humanities community is aligned with our core mission. Though the majority of our attention and resources are targeted at the creation and sustenance of open source software and open access materials for digital scholarship and cultural heritage, those tools and resources are used by a community of practice that is very dear to us. As a result, we are deeply invested in building that community through opportunities for dialogue and engagement.
When it first launched in 2009, DHNow offered a way for researchers and practitioners to find some signal in the noise of the social media landscape. Now that that landscape has fractured, the project has reemerged to offer a reliable point of cohesion and to encourage all of us to renew our commitment collegially sharing our work and our insights about digital humanities research and practice with one another.
Join the Community
Since this effort is at heart a community-building one, there are many ways to get involved. The first and most obvious way that those with interest in the digital humanities can join us is to read the syndicated context. DHNow has two methods of distribution: an RSS feed (https://digitalhumanitiesnow.org/feed/) and a weekly newsletter. Please subscribe to one or both of these modes of distribution!
The second way to join and support the community is to commit to writing about your work and the issues that you think that are important to the field. Make sure that DHNow knows where to find you, by submitting your feed for review by the editors. Then, dedicate some time every couple of weeks to step back and reflect in writing.
Finally, for those who want to be directly involved in the editorial process, DHNow has two opportunities: the Guest Editor program and Editors-at-Large program. The Guest Editor and Editor-at-Large roles are critical to helping DHNow reflect community interests, ideas, and opportunities. Through a semester-long commitment, Guest Editors will be directly selecting an Editors’ Choice post each week. Editors-at-Large have the opportunity to review feed content and nominate noteworthy content at their own pace, as well as using the ‘Nominate This’ bookmarklet to nominate content that they find on the web, outside of the feed sources.