Skip to main content

Editors' Note: July 2021

Editors' note on the July 2021 issue of Reviews in Digital Humanities

Published onJul 12, 2021
Editors' Note: July 2021

We are excited to share the July 2021 issue of Reviews in Digital Humanities.

Reviews in this month’s issue come from our open submission pool, where project directors or digital humanities community members nominate projects for inclusion in the journal. Deploying a wide variety of methods and taking different forms, the projects in this month’s issue take up the issue of community in a range of registers. In this month’s issue, we feature:

  • Project TwitLit, a social media analysis project examining writing communities on Twitter, created by Christian Howard-Sukhil and reviewed by Christina Boyles;

  • War Stories, a digital project that tells the stories of children during World War II, created by Gabrielle Atwood Halko and reviewed by R.C. Miessler;

  • Digital Community Engagement, an open-access volume of case studies on digital partnerships, edited by Rebecca S. Wingo, Jason A. Heppler, and Paul Schadewald and reviewed by Megan Smeznik; and

  • Shakespeare and Company Project, a database of records from Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company bookshop, led by Joshua Kotin and Rebecca Sutton Koeser and reviewed by Andrew Thacker.

These projects and their accompanying reviews shed light on multiple ways that notions of community inform digital humanities practices. The Shakespeare and Company Project offers users unique insight into what reviewer Andrew Thacker terms, “one of the perennial black holes in book history: who read what and when” by articulating networked communities of readers. Digital Community Engagement provides an essential framework for community-engaged digital scholarly practices, emphasizing the importance of authentic, multi-directional collaboration between university and community that resists the noblesse oblige that too-often characterizes such relationships. Christina Boyles and R.C. Miessler, who reviewed Project TwitLit and War Stories, respectively, highlight a crucial theme echoed in Digital Community Engagement: the importance of working with (not on) communities and building connections with those whose stories, histories, and data are included within digital humanities projects. In aggregate, this issue offers clear direction for ethical approaches to communities when using digital methods.

Reviews in Digital Humanities is committed to facilitating peer review for the wide range of digital humanities scholarship being developed. We welcome all methodological approaches and are particularly interested in digital scholarship in Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian studies, as well as projects outside of the U.S. Join our experiment in peer review by submitting a project for review, proposing a special issue, nominating a project you admire, volunteering for our reviewer pool, and telling your colleagues and students about the journal.

Ideas? Questions? Thoughts? Concerns? Contact the editors, Jennifer Guiliano and Roopika Risam, at [email protected] or through the Twitter hashtag #ReviewsInDH.

Comments
0
comment
No comments here
Why not start the discussion?