Editors' Note: October 2020

This month marks an important milestone for Reviews in Digital Humanities: our first birthday! We began arranging peer reviews for digital scholarship a year ago, after issuing our first call for projects in September 2019. Although COVID-19 threw a wrench in the works and led us to lengthen our review deadlines to accommodate the challenges our reviewer community has been facing, we have facilitated review of 27 projects in 7 issues of the journal to date, with more to come in our pipeline. We have published a bilingual (Spanish-English) special issue on Borderlands Digital Humanities, with more special issues in preparation. We have arranged peer reviews for project directors going up for tenure and promotion. And through the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, we have welcomed a new member of our team: Evan Miller, an MA/MAT candidate in English at Salem State University, our editorial assistant.

Our successful first year wouldn’t have been possible without the support from the Reviews in Digital Humanities community. We’d love to hear from you! What has worked? What hasn’t been working? What kinds of topics would you like to see in special issues? How has the journal been useful for you? Have you used the journal in your research or in your teaching? Want to be a reviewer or suggest a project for review? Drop us a note at [email protected] or tweet at us using #ReviewsInDH!

We hope that the publication of our October 2020 issue marks a return to monthly publication of Reviews in Digital Humanities, though we will continue to be responsive to our community’s needs as the pandemic endures. This month’s projects, varied in method and scope, share a deep interest in promoting engaged and interactive user experiences:

• Digital Transgender Archive, an online project dedicated to improving access to transgender-related history, directed by K.J. Rawson and reviewed by Nikita Shepard;

• Georgia Journeys, a digital exploration of experiences of World War II and the Holocaust, directed by Adina Langer and reviewed by Janine Hubai;

• Marianne Moore Digital Archive, a digital project offering reproductions and transcriptions of Moore’s notebooks, directed by Cristanne Miller and reviewed by Ashley Palmer; and

• Bodies and Structures, a collaborative digital history project constructing the spatial histories of the Japanese Empire, directed by Kate McDonald and David Ambaras and reviewed by Paula Curtis.

These projects demonstrate an array of techniques for engaging users in digital humanities scholarship. They offer multiple paths of entry into their materials through search features, maps, tagging, and other forms of project design and organization. Together, they provide excellent examples of how to encourage users to keep returning for more.

Reviews in Digital Humanities is committed to demonstrating and facilitating peer review for the wide range of digital humanities scholarship being developed. Join our experiment by submitting a project for review, nominating a project you admire, volunteering for our reviewer pool, and telling your colleagues and students about the journal.

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