Questions of Access in the Digital Humanities: Data from JDSH – Ernesto Priego

"It’s been three years since I personally presented that poster at DH2014 in Lausanne, but the topic of publishing pracitices within the digital humanities keeps being of great interest to me. It could be thought of as extreme academic navel-gazing, this business of deciding to look into bibliometric indicators and metadata of scholarly publications. For the digital humanities, however, questions of scholarly communications are questions of methodology, as the technologies and practices required for conducting research and teaching are closely related to the technologies and practices required to make the ‘results’ of teaching and research available. For DH insiders, this is closely connected to the good ol’ less-yacking-more-hacking, or rather, no yacking without hacking. Today, scholarly publishing is all about technological infrastructure, or at least about an ever-growing awareness of the challenges and opportunities of ‘hacking’ the modes of scholarly production.

Moreover, the digital humanities have also been for long preoccupied with the challenges in getting digital scholarship recoginsed and rewarded, and, also importantly, about the difficulties to ensure the human, technical and financial preconditions of sustainability. Scholarly publishing, or more precisely ‘scholarly communications’ as we prefer to say today, are also very much focused on those same concerns. If form and content are unavoidably interlinked and codependent in digital humanities practice, surely issues regarding the so-called ‘dissemination’ of said practice through publications remain vital to its development."