POST: Peer-Reviewing Digital Scholarship: A New Conference Leads the Way

The American Historical Association has published a post about the new Current Research in Digital Humanities (CRDH) conference, to be held on March 17, 2018, at George Mason University. Providing an avenue for peer review of digital scholarship, CRDH and its subsequent proceedings will broaden the scholarly conversation and “expand the possibility for who is able to contribute to the discipline.”

The CRDH digital conference proceedings—which will include articles that focus on arguments being put forward rather than project descriptions—will be peer reviewed by members of the program committee. During the conference sessions, commentators will provide further feedback, and scholars will be able to revise their articles before the digital publication is released.

CRDH will serve a critical role in the scholarly communication ecosystem, especially in its rewards and incentives systems, as it will fill a void for “serious peer review and citation of digital history.”

Proposals for CRDH are due September 29, 2017. The theme of the 2018 conference, for which one track of three sessions has been reserved, is the history of slavery. According to selection criteria included in the CFP:

The primary criterion by which these presentations and panels will be judged is whether they advance historical argumentation. In other words, while digital methods will be common to all the presentations, we will select presentations that show how those methods have advanced specific interpretations of history. The program committee is charged with creating panels that include people of color, female, queer, and independent scholars, junior scholars, and graduate students.