Open Access Projects in Digital Humanities Win Prestigious Prizes, Tackle Social Problems and Spark Intellectual Debates | Open Science

"Given that digital humanities, as a minor but growing academic domain, promote scholar collaboration, cross disciplinary boundaries and demonstrate public-mindedness, the celebration of its achievements, such as in research, underlines the centrality of Open Access to its public relevance.

While digital humanities can be tentatively defined as an interdisciplinary field that explores the intersections between digital tools and media, on the one hand, and humanities-related subject matter, on the other hand, Open Access is a broad characterization of the projects accomplished in this field, which can comprise online archives, freely accessible digital resources and online initiatives, such as in education and data sharing. No less importantly, digital humanities output can also include academic articles, topical issues of scholarly journals and monograph-scale investigations, for instance in Open Access, as studies recently published by De Gruyter demonstrate. Though digital humanities is a nascent field of scholarly inquiry, it already has a significant presence at academic conferences, such as at the annual get-together of the Modern Language Association. Given their basis in technological tools and interfaces, digital humanities projects may, however, struggle to be funded, especially at smaller scale educational or research institutions, such as community colleges. Yet this does not impede the harnessing of digital humanities for educational, research or archival purposes in the framework of topical projects that leverage disparate institutional resources, e.g., the United States’ Library of Congress’ strategic plans to promote specialized information availability for the general public and scholars around the world, in which Open Access de facto plays a significant role...."