CFP: Digital Humanities in the Library: Challenges and Opportunities for Subject Specialists

The editors of Digital Humanities in the Library: Challenges and Opportunities for Subject Specialists welcome chapter proposals for a revised second edition.

Five years after the publication of Digital Humanities in the Library, digital humanities — as a field of study and community of practice — continues to transform how scholars and librarians research and teach. While our first book examined how subject librarians often navigated between humanities faculty and digital scholarship specialists, the revised second edition will examine the ongoing transformation of libraries and library subject specialists in the face of continued changes in scholarly practice, digital teaching and learning environments, and the academic enterprise. We look forward to this new, revised edition continuing valuable conversations about the future of our profession.

New areas of focus in this edition include:

• diversity, inclusion, and equity
• dismantling white supremacy and decolonizing the digital
• labor, precarity, and infrastructure
• scholarly communication and taxonomies of credit
• long-term sustainability, such as that advocated for by the Maintainers movement
• library DH in the age of institutional austerity
• library DH in the age of COVID-19

The editors will be updating the first edition’s section on “Projects in Focus” to revisit projects and people with a “where are they now” approach. As one movement in DH in the past five years has been from what we might call “project-based DH” to “infrastructural” DH, we are particularly interested in chapters that investigate what kinds of labor arrangements, in the library and in universities more broadly, make work and production sustainable.

• Proposal submission deadline is December 1, 2020.
• Authors of accepted proposals will be notified by January 31, 2021.
• Full drafts of accepted chapters are due to editors on April 15, 2021.

Potential contributors are invited to submit proposals of not more than two pages for chapters of 3,000-5,000 words. Proposals should include: 1) the names and contact information for all authors (identify a main contact); 2) a clear description of the topic you are proposing for a potential chapter; 3) reasons why this topic would be of interest to people working at the intersection of libraries and DH. Submissions should be in Microsoft Word or pdf attachment.

In keeping with the editors’ commitment to anti-racist practice, we are particularly interested in proposals from BIPOC authors and authors affiliated with Historically Black Colleges and Universities, tribal and First Nations institutions, and other BIPOC-serving institutions. We are also interested in proposals from potential contributors who have varied roles, including graduate students, early career scholars and librarians, independent DH scholars and librarians, and those precariously employed.

Inquiries and submissions can be sent to: Arianne Hartsell-Gundy, Head of Humanities Section at Duke University (arianne.hartsell.gundy@duke.edu)

Editors: Arianne Hartsell-Gundy (Duke University), Laura Braunstein (Dartmouth College), Liorah Golomb (University of Oklahoma)